Statistical Shape Modeling and Segmentation of the Left Ventricle Endocardium from CMR images based on Different Anatomical Landmark Alignments

Statistical Shape Modeling is widely used in many applications of cardiac images. Many efforts have been done to generate optimized Statistical Shape Models (SSMs). In this paper, we evaluated three different 3D endocardial models constructed using different alignment procedures. From 20 healthy CMR datasets, three different endocardial models are generated by varying the surface alignment methods means based on the Center of the Apex (CoA), the Center of Mass (CoM), and the Center of the Basal (CoB) of the endocardium. Then Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to show the maximum variation of the SSMs. The constructed statistical models are compared by measuring the compactness, generalization ability, and specificity. Besides, the performance of each model in the 3D endocardial segmentation application using the Active Shape Model (ASM) technique is evaluated by the Hausdorff Distance (HD) criterion. The results indicate that the CoB-based model is less compact than the CoA-based model but more compact than the CoM-based model. Although for a constant number of modes the reconstruction error is approximately the same for all models, surface alignment based on CoB leads to generate a more specific model than the others. The resulted HDs show that the CoB alignment strategy produces the ASM which has the best performance in 3D endocardial segmentation among the other models. The computed results from the quantitative analysis demonstrate that varying alignment strategies affect the quality of the constructed SSM. It is obvious that the specificity and segmentation accuracy of the proposed CoB-based model outperforms the classical CoM-based approach.