Use of computational realistic models for the cardiac ejection fraction calculation

Abstract

Abstract Ejection fraction is one of the most useful clinical descriptors to determine the cardiac function of a subject. For this reason, obtaining the value of this descriptor is of vital importance and requires high precision. However, in the clinical routine, to generate the mentioned descriptor value, a geometric hypothesis is assumed, obtaining an approximate value for this fraction, usually by excess, and which is a dependent-operator. The aim of the present work is to propose the accurate calculation of the ejection fraction from realistic models, obtained computationally, of the cardiac chamber called right ventricle. Normally, the geometric hypothesis that makes this ventricle coincide with a pyramidal type geometric shape, is not usually, fulfilled in subjects affected by several cardiac pathologies, so as an alternative to this problem, the computational segmentation process is used to generate the morphology of the right ventricle and from it proceeds to obtain, accurately, the ejection fraction value. In this sense, an automatic strategy based on no-lineal filters, smart operator and region growing technique is propose in order to generate the right ventricle ejection fraction. The results are promising due we obtained an excellent correspondence between the manual segmentation and the automatic one generated by the realistic models.