The segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) from CINE MRI images is essential
to infer important clinical parameters. Typically, machine learning algorithms
for automated LV segmentation use annotated contours from only two cardiac
phases, diastole, and systole. In this work, we present an analysis work-flow
for fully-automated LV segmentation that learns from images acquired through
the cardiac cycle. The workflow consists of three components: first, for each
image in the sequence, we perform an automated localization and subsequent
cropping of the bounding box containing the cardiac silhouette. Second, we
identify the LV contours using a Temporal Fully Convolutional Neural Network
(T-FCNN), which extends Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNN) through a
recurrent mechanism enforcing temporal coherence across consecutive frames.
Finally, we further defined the boundaries using either one of two components:
fully-connected Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) with Gaussian edge potentials
and Semantic Flow. Our initial experiments suggest that significant improvement
in performance can potentially be achieved by using a recurrent neural network
component that explicitly learns cardiac motion patterns whilst performing LV
segmentation.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, published on IEEE Xplor