Left Ventricle Segmentation in Cardiac Ultrasound Using Hough-Forests With Implicit Shape and Appearance Priors

Abstract

We propose a learning based approach to perform automatic segmentation of the left ventricle in 3D cardiac ultrasound images. The segmentation contour is estimated through the use of a variant of Hough forests whose object localization capabilities are coupled with a patch-wise, appearance driven, contour estimation strategy. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on a dataset of 30 images acquired from 15 patients using different equipment and settings.