Advanced Biomedical Engineering
Online ISSN : 2187-5219
ISSN-L : 2187-5219
Spatially Controllable Region Growing for Segmenting Heart Chambers
Takashi IjiriShogo TsuruokaHiryu KamoshitaAkira HirabayashiShin InadaIsao ShiraishiKen-ichi KurosakiKazuo Nakazawa
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JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS

2020 Volume 9 Pages 172-180

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Abstract

Segmentation of computed tomography (CT) images has provided promising methods of constructing precise 3-dimensional heart models. However, the process is labor intensive, because heart regions such as cardiac chambers and blood vessels have similar intensities and exist within a small space. In this paper, we present a tool to efficiently segment cardiac chambers and blood vessels. We extend traditional region growing to be spatially controllable. A user places multiple seeds, each having a bounding area and a threshold, and our tool “grows” regions around each seed independently within its bounding area. To efficiently specify the bounding area, we propose two types of seeds (i.e., sphere and cylinder). We also provide a negative seed that generates fixed background to avoid over-extraction errors. We compared our tool with a traditional scissor tool and confirmed that ours significantly reduced the time required for a segmentation task. We also present segmentation results of CT images of hearts having congenital diseases to illustrate the feasibility of our tool.

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© 2020 Japanese Society for Medical and Biological Engineering

Copyright: ©2020 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons BY 4.0 International (Attribution) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode), which permits the unrestricted distribution, reproduction and use of the article provided the original source and authors are credited.
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