Patent ID: 8433113

Claim:
A method of detecting a blood pool of a left ventricle (LV) in a three-dimensional temporal (3D+T) image, the method comprising: localizing a heart in a moving 3D image based on motion information of each slice of each 3D image of the moving 3D image over a period of time to generate a region of interest (ROI); determining pixels of the ROI that are indicative of blood; extracting first connected components from the determined pixels; grouping the first connected components from neighboring slices of the 3D image based on criteria that are indicative of a blood pool of a left ventricle; and identifying the group that corresponds to the LV blood pool wherein the localizing of the heart comprises: identifying a single connected component from second connected components among the slices based on relative sizes and relative motions among the second connected components; and identifying a subset of the second connected components based on the relative sizes and overlaps between the single connected component and the other second connected components.