Segmentation of Scarred Myocardium in Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Images

The segmentation of scarred and nonscarred myocardium in Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) is obtained using different features and feature combinations in a Bayes classifier. The used features are found as a local average of intensity values and the underlying texture information in scarred and nonscarred myocardium. The segmentation classifier was trained and tested with different experimental setups and parameter combinations and was cross validated due to limited data. The experimental results show that the intensity variations are indeed an important feature for good segmentation, and the average area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, that is, the AUC, is 91.58 ± 3.2%. The segmentation using texture features also gives good segmentation with average AUC values at 85.89 ± 5.8%, that is, lower than the direct current (DC) feature. However, the texture feature gives robust performance compared to a local mean (DC) feature in a test set simulated from the original CMR data. The segmentation of scarred myocardium is comparable to manual segmentation in all the cross validation cases.