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Automatic computation of left ventricle ejection fraction from dynamic ultrasound images

  • Information Technologies for Biomedical and Biotechnical Systems
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Abstract

Left Ventricle (LV) Ejection Fraction (EF) is a fundamental parameter for heart function assessment. Being based on border tracing, however, manual computation of EF is time-consuming and extremely prone to inter-and intraobserver variability. In this paper we present an automatic method for EF computation which provides results in agreement with those provided by expert observers. The segmentation strategy consists of two stages: first, the region of interest is identified by means of mimetic criteria; then, the identified region is used for initialization of an active contour based on a variational formulation of level set methods, which provides accurate segmentation of the LV cavity. Volume calculation is then performed according to the conventional Simpson’s rule and, finally, the EF is computed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI), Italian National Research Council (CNR), via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124, Pisa, Italy

    U. Barcaro, D. Moroni & O. Salvetti

Authors
  1. U. Barcaro
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  2. D. Moroni
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  3. O. Salvetti
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Correspondence to U. Barcaro.

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The text was submitted by the authors in English.

Umberto Barcaro is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of Pisa University and an Associate Researcher at the Signals and Images Laboratory of the Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the National Research Council. He teaches Physics and Computer Science Laboratory at the Faculty of Pharmacy, and Signal Theory at the Faculty of Sciences. His research activity regards the automatic analysis of signals and images of clinical interest. In particular, he has studied spontaneous and evoked electroencephalographic and polygraphic signals, and ultrasound images.

Davide Moroni (Magenta, 1977), M.Sc. in Mathematics honours degree from the University of Pisa in 2001, dipl. at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in 2002, PhD in Mathematics at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” in 2006, is a research fellow at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council, in Pisa. His main interests include geometric modeling, computational topology, image processing and medical imaging. At present he is involved in a number of European research projects working in discrete geometry and dynamic scene analysis.

Ovidio Salvetti, director of research at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), in Pisa, is working in the field of theoretical and applied computer vision. His fields of research are image analysis and understanding, pictorial information systems, spatial modeling, and intelligent processes in computer vision.

He is a coauthor of four books and monographs and more than three hundred technical and scientific articles; he also possesses ten patents regarding systems and software tools for image processing. He has been a scientific coordinator of several national and European research and industrial projects, in collaboration with Italian and foreign research groups, in the fields of computer vision and high-performance computing for diagnostic imaging.

He is member of the editorial boards of the international journals Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis and G. Ronchi Foundation Acts. He is at present the CNR contact person in ERCIM (the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) for the Working Group on Vision and Image Understanding, member of IEEE and of the steering committee of a number of EU projects. He is head of the ISTI Signals and Images Laboratory.

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Barcaro, U., Moroni, D. & Salvetti, O. Automatic computation of left ventricle ejection fraction from dynamic ultrasound images. Pattern Recognit. Image Anal. 18, 351–358 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1054661808020247

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