Probabilistic Edge Map (PEM) for 3D Ultrasound Image Registration and Multi-atlas Left Ventricle Segmentation

Automated left ventricle (LV) segmentation in 3D ultrasound (3D-US) remains a challenging research problem due to variable image quality and limited field-of-view. Modern segmentation approaches (shape, appearance and contour model based surface fitting) require an accurate initialization and good image boundary features to obtain reliable and consistent results. They are therefore not well suited for this problem. The proposed method overcomes those limitations with a novel and generic 3D-US image boundary representation technique: Probabilistic Edge Map (PEM). This new representation captures regularized and complete edge responses from standard 3D-US images. PEM is utilized in a multi-atlas LV segmentation framework to spatially align target and atlas images. Experiments on data from the MICCAI CETUS challenge show that the proposed approach is better suited for LV segmentation than the active contour, appearance and voxel classification approaches, achieving lower surface distance errors and better LV volume estimates.