Patent Document ID: 10078893
Application ID: 13977877
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for automatic left ventricular inner border detection, the method comprising: performing segmentation on an echocardiogram by segmenting the echocardiogram simultaneously with pixel mapping using piece-wise histogram equalization, wherein the piecewise histogram equalization comprises transforming a pixel intensity histogram of a homogenous regions of the echocardiogram into an equalized histogram having an optimal uniform distribution of intensities, and assigning new intensity values to pixels of the homogenous regions of the echocardiogram based on said equalized histogram, thereby obtaining a multi-level image map having at least three uniformly distributed intensity levels, wherein a first intensity level represents blood, a second intensity represents noise and/or edges and a third intensity level represents myocardium; converting the multi-level image map into a binary image by attributing pixels of one or more darker levels of the multilevel image map to the left ventricular cavity and pixels of one or more lighter levels of the image map to the myocardium; identifying edges in the binary image; applying a radial filter to the edges of the myocardium in the binary image to extract an approximate inner border of the left ventricular cavity and to separate the inner border from the outer border; and performing shape modeling on the approximate inner border to complete representation of the left ventricular inner border, wherein the shape modeling is a polynomial shape modeling.