  Automatic segmentation of myocardium in Late Gadolinium Enhanced (LGE)
Cardiac MR (CMR) images is often difficult due to the intensity heterogeneity
resulting from accumulation of contrast agent in infarcted areas. In this
paper, we propose an automatic segmentation framework that fully utilizes
shared information between corresponding cine and LGE images of a same patient.
Given myocardial contours in cine CMR images, the proposed framework achieves
accurate segmentation of LGE CMR images in a coarse-to-fine manner. Affine
registration is first performed between the corresponding cine and LGE image
pair, followed by nonrigid registration, and finally local deformation of
myocardial contours driven by forces derived from local features of the LGE
image. Experimental results on real patient data with expert outlined ground
truth show that the proposed framework can generate accurate and reliable
results for myocardial segmentation of LGE CMR images.
