Authors:
Eva Costa
1
;
Nelson Martins
1
;
2
;
Malik Saad Sultan
2
;
3
;
Diana Veiga
1
;
Manuel João Ferreira
1
;
4
;
Sandra Mattos
5
and
Miguel Coimbra
3
;
2
Affiliations:
1
Enermeter, Sistemas de Medição, Lda, Portugal
;
2
Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, Portugal
;
3
Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal
;
4
University of Minho, Portugal
;
5
Círculo do Coração de Pernambuco, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Mitral Regurgitation, Echocardiography, Segmentation, Doppler, Heart, Medical Image Processing.
Abstract:
Rheumatic Fever and Rheumatic Heart Disease remain a major burden among children in developing countries.
Echocardiography with colour flow Doppler is key to early diagnosis. However, the technique requires time
and experienced operators, which are scarce resources in the affected areas. Automatic segmentation of colour
Doppler regurgitation jets could, potentially, reduce the cost of screening, and spread diagnostic accessibility
for a larger number of patients. Ultrasound processing is very challenging due to speckle noise and similarity
of representation of all kinds of tissue. Region-based active contours are suitable tools for the segmentation
in cases of intensity heterogeneities, which makes them interesting algorithms for left atrium segmentation.
HSV colour space describes colour in terms of hues and saturation, which may facilitate the translation of
medical interpretation of the Doppler pseudo-colour into mathematical expression for colour segmentation. A
total of 979 fram
es from 20 sequences were manually annotated and used to validate the proposed pipeline.
Overall, the results for colour pattern segmentation are promising (sensitivity=0.91 false detection rate=0.10),
but further developments are required for the atrium segmentation (sensitivity=0.80, false detection rate=0.28).
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