Heart Localization from Magnetic Resonance Images Sequence

Abstract

Problem statement: Heart localization is an important step in cardiac Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) analysis. This study aims to locate the moving heart region from MRI sequence of images. Approach: The idea is to use the motion detection techniques to isolate the heart region from the background image and then apply morphological operations to construct a moving heart region mask. The mask is then applied to the MRI image to separate the Region Of Interest (ROI) that includes the heart. The K-means clustering algorithm is applied to the ROI to segment the heart walls. Results: Experimental results have shown that the performance of the proposed technique is superior to other MRI heart segmentation techniques in both complexity and accuracy. Conclusion: The proposed technique can be used as a pre segmentation step in any other future heart segmentation techniques to increase their accuracy through the localization of the moving heart region. The presented technique is fully automated technique and superior compared to other segmentation techniques.