Affiliations: [a] Department of Information Management, National Chung Cheng University, Minhsiung, Chiayi, Taiwan | [b] Advanced Institute of Manufacturing with High-tech Innovations, National Chung Cheng University, Minhsiung, Chiayi, Taiwan
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Wei-Yen Hsu, Department of Information Management and Advanced Institute of Manufacturing with High-tech Innovations, National Chung Cheng University, Minhsiung, Chiayi, Taiwan. E-mail:shenswy@gmail.com
Abstract: Cardiac ultrasound imaging tracking is an important issue
in medical image analysis. The results of tracking greatly influence the
diagnoses and judgment of physicians. However, the conventional active
contour model is inappropriate for use in cardiac imaging tracking since the
mitral and tricuspid valves rise and fall, leading to poor tracking and
excessive convergence in overall contour during systoles and
diastoles. In this study, a novel tracking approach,
combining the active contour model and scale invariant feature transform, is
proposed for use in cardiac ultrasound imaging tracking. In addition to
preprocessing that removes some noise and detects initial cardiac edges
automatically, the active contour model is used to segment and track cardiac
regions. The scale invariant feature transform is proposed to determine and
track the correct positions of heart valves. The performance of the proposed
method is evaluated by testing with cardiac ultrasound image sequence and in
comparison with five other tracking techniques in terms of several metrics,
such as segmentation accuracy, AUC, the Dice coefficient, and modified
Hausdorff distance. The results indicate that the proposed method is more
accurate and effective in the tracking of cardiac imaging.
