COMPUTATION OF LEFT-VENTRICULAR VOLUME CURVES FROM GATED BLOOD-POOL STUDIES WITHOUT EXPLICIT USE OF EDGE-DETECTION ALGORITHMS - CONCISE COMMUNICATION

A new technique has been developed to compute left ventricular(LV) tim e activity curves from gated blood pool (GBP) studies without the use of manual, semiautomated or fully automated edge detection algorithms. The method utilizes the correlation of entropy calculated from the co unts of a fixed region of interest covering the left ventricle during a cardiac cycle to compute the LV volume curve for a new patient. The new LV volume curve is obtained through interpolation of those volume curves of a data base which are associated with the closest variations in normalized entropy, to the new one. The computed LV time activity curves agree with those obtained from manual or fully automated outlin es of the left ventricle within 9 percent for the selected set of 67 p atients demonstrating the potential of the method. The accuracy of cal culated LV volume curves can be improved theoretically to any degree b y increasing the number of cases in the data base of known statistical feature vectors associated with the LV images and LV volume curves. T he new method for computation of LV curves is very efficient and robus t when compared to traditional techniques.