Patent ID: 8295569

Claim:
A method for segmenting a mitral valve inflow (MI) pattern in a Doppler echocardiogram image, comprising: detecting left root candidates, right root candidates, and peak candidates in the image using trained root detectors; detecting single triangle candidates and double triangle candidates in the image based on the left root candidates, right root candidates, and peak candidates using trained global box detectors, wherein a detection probability is determined for each of the single triangle candidates and each of the double triangle candidates; determining a shape probability for each of the single triangle candidates and the double triangle candidates; selecting a best single triangle candidate based on the detection probabilities and shape probabilities of the single triangle candidates and a best double triangle candidate based on the detection probabilities and the shape probabilities of the double triangle candidates; and segmenting an MI pattern in the image by selecting one of the best single triangle candidate and the best double triangle candidate based on a shape probability comparison.