The present invention relates to medical imaging of the heart, and more particularly, to automatic detection of anatomic landmarks of the left ventricle in magnetic resonance long axis image slices.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in developed countries. Early diagnosis can be effective in reducing the mortality of cardiovascular disease. Quantification of the left ventricle (LV) is of particular interest among the four heart chambers because it pumps oxygenated blood from the heart to the rest of the body. In particular, precise measurements of both the dimensions and functions of the LV are essential in clinical applications for diagnosis, prognostic, and therapeutic decisions. Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging can accurately depict cardiac structure, function, perfusion, and myocardial viability, and precise measurements can be achieved using MR imaging. Accordingly, MRI is widely accepted as the standard for heart chamber quantification. However, due to the considerable amount of information available, analysis, such as segmentation, of cardiac images for functionality quantification is time consuming and error-prone for human operators. Thus, automated methods for analyzing MR images are needed.
In MR scans, long axis slices are used as scout images for acquisition planning, as well as to complement a stack of short axis slices. Long axis slices capture the LV's shape information and can also be used to correct mis-registration of the short axis stack. Long axis acquisitions can be an image sequence of long axis slices or a single slice that is scanned during MR acquisition planning. Anatomic landmarks in an MR long axis slice can be used for higher level segmentation, such as initialization of deformable model based approaches, and for accelerating acquisition time of a full MR scan by facilitating fully automatic planning of cardiac MR examinations. Thus, automatic detection of anatomic landmarks in a cardiac MR long axis slice is desirable.