Fully Automatic Scar Segmentation for Late Gadolinium Enhancement MRI Images in Left Ventricle with Myocardial Infarction

• Published in: Current medical science Vol. 41; no. 2; pp. 398 - 404
• Main Authors: Wu, Zheng-hong, Sun, Li-ping, Liu, Yun-long, Dong, Dian-dian, Tong, Lv, Deng, Dong-dong, He, Yi, Wang, Hui, Sun, Yi-bo, Dong, Jian-zeng, Xia, Ling
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Wuhan Huazhong University of Science and Technology 01-04-2021; Department of Cardiology, Beijing Anzhen Hospital, Capital Medical University and National Clinical Research Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, Beijing 100029, China; College of Biomedical Engineering & Instrument Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China%Department of Cardiology, the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450052, China%School of Biomedical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China%Department of Cardiology, Beijing Anzhen Hospital, Capital Medical University and National Clinical Research Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, Beijing 100029, China; Department of Cardiology, Beijing Friendship Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing 100050, China%Department of Cardiology, Beijing Anzhen Hospital, Capital Medical University and National Clinical Research Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, Beijing 100029, China%Department of Cardiology, the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450052, China
• Subjects: Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; cardiac magnetic resonance with late gadolinium enhancement; automatic scar segmentation; myocardial infarction
• ISSN: 2096-5230; 1672-0733; 2523-899X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11596-021-2360-z

Summary
Numerous methods have been published to segment the infarct tissue in the left ventricle, most of them either need manual work, post-processing, or suffer from poor reproducibility. We proposed an automatic segmentation method for segmenting the infarct tissue in left ventricle with myocardial infarction. Cardiac images of a total of 60 diseased hearts (55 human hearts and 5 porcine hearts) were used in this study. The epicardial and endocardial boundaries of the ventricles in every 2D slice of the cardiac magnetic resonance with late gadolinium enhancement images were manually segmented. The subsequent pipeline of infarct tissue segmentation is fully automatic. The segmentation results with the automatic algorithm proposed in this paper were compared to the consensus ground truth. The median of Dice overlap between our automatic method and the consensus ground truth is 0.79. We also compared the automatic method with the consensus ground truth using different image sources from different centers with different scan parameters and different scan machines. The results showed that the Dice overlap with the public dataset was 0.83, and the overall Dice overlap was 0.79. The results show that our method is robust with respect to different MRI image sources, which were scanned by different centers with different image collection parameters. The segmentation accuracy we obtained is comparable to or better than that of the conventional semi-automatic methods. Our segmentation method may be useful for processing large amount of dataset in clinic.