Automatic detection of left ventricular contours from cardiac cine magnetic resonance imaging using fuzzy logic

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES. Gated cardiac cine magnetic resonance imaging pro vides accurate dynamic data of the left ventricular function, However, the manual extraction of important physiologic parameters such as myocardium wa ll thickness and left ventricular volumes is invariably time consuming and subjective, To reduce the variability and time constraints inherent in obse rver contour tracing, the authors developed an automatic left ventricle con tour-detection method. METHODS. The purpose was to apply fuzzy logic-based automatic contour detec tion to identification of endocardial and epicardial borders in short-axis magnetic resonance images, The automatic contouring was compared with manua l tracing using the calculated ejection fraction as the comparison criterio n. RESULTS. A good correlation was found between the two approaches (r(2) = 0. 98). CONCLUSIONS. The ejection fraction can be obtained using this automatic con touring method.