Fully automated active appearance motion models successfully delineated left ventricular endocardial contours in 97% of cases, with an average distance to manual landmarks of 3.3 mm.
Does the active appearance motion model (AAMM) accurately delineate left ventricular endocardial contours in echocardiographic sequences of infarct patients?
The AAMM technique provides accurate, fully automated, and time-continuous delineation of left ventricular endocardial contours in echocardiograms.
A novel extension of active appearance models (AAMs) for automated border detection in echocardiographic image sequences is reported. The active appearance motion model (AAMM) technique allows fully automated robust and time-continuous delineation of left ventricular (LV) endocardial contours over the full heart cycle with good results. Nonlinear intensity normalization was developed and employed to accommodate ultrasound-specific intensity distributions. The method was trained and tested on 16-frame phase-normalized transthoracic four-chamber sequences of 129 unselected infarct patients, split randomly into a training set (n = 65) and a test set (n = 64). Borders were compared to expert drawn endocardial contours. On the test set, fully automated AAMM performed well in 97% of the cases (average distance between manual and automatic landmark points was 3.3 mm, comparable to human interobserver variabilities). The ultrasound-specific intensity normalization proved to be of great value for good results in echocardiograms. The AAMM was significantly more accurate than an equivalent set of two-dimensional AAMs.
Bosch et al. (Fri,) conducted a other in Infarct patients (n=129). Active appearance motion model (AAMM) vs. Expert drawn endocardial contours and two-dimensional AAMs was evaluated on Average distance between manual and automatic landmark points. Fully automated active appearance motion models successfully delineated left ventricular endocardial contours in 97% of cases, with an average distance to manual landmarks of 3.3 mm.