A Novel 3D-to-3D Diffeomorphic Registration Algorithm With Applications to Left Ventricle Segmentation in MR and Ultrasound Sequences

Abstract

Left ventricular segmentation is a difficult and time-consuming task performed by clinicians, requiring the use of manual contours. We propose a novel three-dimensional diffeomorphic registration algorithm for endocardial segmentation of the left ventricle in magnetic resonance images and ultrasound temporal sequences. The proposed diffeomorphic registration method computes a voxel-to-voxel correspondence in three-dimensional space and is parameterized by one radial and three curl components to emulate the cardiac deformations. In addition, the proposed method allows for enforcing constraints to control the amount of deformation. The method was evaluated on 521 temporal frames from 20 patients from the Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge magnetic resonance imaging dataset and 213 frames from 10 patients undergoing ultrasound scans from the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute. The algorithm was compared against six other registration methods, the Symmetric Normalization algorithm from the Dipy package, two variants of the Demons algorithm from the Insight Toolkit software package, two versions of RealTiTracker, and Elastix. The proposed method yielded overall Dice scores of 98.10 (0.90)% for the MRI dataset and 92.90 (2.42)% for the ultrasound dataset. The robustness of the algorithm is demonstrated by the high performance on multiple imaging modalities and various patient abnormalities.

Keywords

• Image registration
• image segmentation
• left ventricle
• MRI
• ultrasound