AUTOMATIC RIGHT-VENTRICULAR EJECTION FRACTION COMPUTATION FROM EQUILIBRIUM AND FIRST-PASS SCINTIGRAPHIC CARDIAC IMAGES

This paper presents an automatic method for computing the right ventri cular ejection fraction (RVEF) by using both equilibrium and first-pas s scintigraphic cardiac images. The equilibrium images are used to ext ract the cardiac activity area. Together with the phase image derived from the right heart first-pass images, the cardiac area is then used to identify the subarea corresponding to the right ventricle. The RVEF is then computed from the regional counts in the end-diastolic and en d-systolic frames. The average manually derived RVEFs agreed with the automatically determined RVEFs with an R value of 0.81. Using the aver age of the manually derived RVEFs as the ''gold standard,'' only one p erson processing manually had a lower mean squared error than the auto matic program. These results suggest that automatic RVEF computation i s potentially useful and hence clinical deployment is recommended. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.