Left ventricle segmentation in ultrasound sequences for the automatic computation of ejection fraction

Left Ventricle (LV) Ejection Fraction (EF) is a fundamental parameter for heart function assessment. Being based on border tracing, however, manual computation of EF is timeconsuming and extremely prone to inter- and intra- observer variability. In this paper we present an automatic method for EF computation, which provides results in agreement with those provided by expert observers. The segmentation strategy consists of two stages: first, the region of interest is identified by means of mimetic criteria; the identified region is then used for initialization of an active contour based on a variational formulation of Level Set methods, which provides accurate segmentation of LV cavity. Volume calculation is then performed according to the conventional Simpson's rule and, finally, EF is computed.