Myocardial infarct localization using neighbourhood approximation forests

Abstract

This paper presents a machine-learning algorithm for the automatic localization of myocardial infarct in the left ventricle. Our method constructs neighbourhood approximation forests, which are trained with previously diagnosed 4D cardiac sequences. We introduce a new set of features that simultaneously exploit information from the shape and motion of the myocardial wall along the cardiac cycle. More precisely, characteristics are extracted from a hyper surface that represents the profile of the myocardial thickness. The method has been tested on a database of 65 cardiac MRI images in order to retrieve the diagnosed infarct area. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the NAF in predicting the left ventricular infarct location in 7 distinct regions. We evaluated our method by verifying the database ground truth. Following a new examination of the 4D cardiac images, our algorithm may detect misclassified infarct locations in the database.