Patent ID: 8494236

Claim:
A method for cardiac segmentation in magnetic resonance (MR) cine data, the method comprising the steps of: providing a time series of 3D cardiac MR images acquired at a plurality of phases over at least one cardiac cycle, wherein each 3D image comprises a plurality of 2D slices, wherein a heart and blood pool has been detected in each image; analyzing gray scales of each image in the time series of images to compute histograms of the blood pool, myocardium, and the whole series of images; using image pixels in peaks of said histograms to seed a multiseeded fuzzy connected algorithm to group image pixels into homogenous regions for the heart, blood pool, and background to form a label image, wherein said heart, blood pool, and background are labeled; calculating non-rigid registration deformation fields to register a selected image slice with corresponding slices in each phase of the time series of images; computing endocardium and epicardium gradients for one phase of the selected image slice, including computing probability images P M and P B as responses from the myocardium and blood pool histograms; computing gradients of said probability images and of the selected image slice; analyzing said label image L to find upwards transitions from the myocardium to non-myocardium, and smoothing said transitions; and computing the gradients for the endocardium and epicardium according to G endo ⁡ ( x ) = { 0 , if ⁢ ⁢ π < ∇ P M → < 2 ⁢ π ⁢ ⁢ or ⁢ ⁢ 0 < ∇ P B → < π ∇ P M ⁡ ( x ) + 0.5 ⁢ ∇ f ⁡ ( x ) + ∇ L ⁡ ( x ) 2.5 , otherwise , ⁢ G epi ⁡ ( x ) = { 0 , if ⁢ ⁢ 0 < ∇ P M → < π 0.5 ⁢ ∇ P M ⁡ ( x ) + 0.5 ⁢ ∇ P B ⁡ ( x ) + ∇ f ⁡ ( x ) 2 , otherwise , wherein x is a pixel, G endo (x) is the endocardium gradient, G epi (x) is the epicardium contour, ∇P M (x) is the myocardium gradient, ∇P B (x) is the blood pool gradient, ∇f(x) is the image slice gradient, and ∇L(x) is the label image gradient; computing contours for the endocardium and epicardium from said gradients in said one phase of said selected image slice; and recovering the endocardium and epicardium contours in all phases of the selected image slice, wherein said recovered endocardium and epicardium contours segment the heart in said selected image slice.