  Accurate delineation of the left ventricle (LV) is an important step in
evaluation of cardiac function. In this paper, we present an automatic method
for segmentation of the LV in cardiac CT angiography (CCTA) scans. Segmentation
is performed in two stages. First, a bounding box around the LV is detected
using a combination of three convolutional neural networks (CNNs).
Subsequently, to obtain the segmentation of the LV, voxel classification is
performed within the defined bounding box using a CNN. The study included CCTA
scans of sixty patients, fifty scans were used to train the CNNs for the LV
localization, five scans were used to train LV segmentation and the remaining
five scans were used for testing the method. Automatic segmentation resulted in
the average Dice coefficient of 0.85 and mean absolute surface distance of 1.1
mm. The results demonstrate that automatic segmentation of the LV in CCTA scans
using voxel classification with convolutional neural networks is feasible.
