SEGMENTING TAGGED CARDIAC MRI DATA USING A LOCAL VARIANCE FILTER

Abstract

We present a new method for segmenting tagged MRI data. It is based on the observation that the tagging grid vanishes almost immediately inside the ventricles because of the blood flow. Segmentation can be therefore driven by the intensity of the tagging grid. We estimate the intensity using a local variance filter. The main segmentation is computed by the graph-cuts method, though other segmentation methods can also be used. We compare the results obtained by our method with manual segmentation.