Automatic exclusion of papillary muscles and trabeculae from blood volume measurements in cine cardiac magnetic resonance images

Short axis cine cardiac magnetic resonance is used for measuring ventricular blood volumes. Papillary muscles and trabeculae should be excluded from these volumes, despite being included by delineations that allow measurements of wall thickness. We have developed and evaluated three methods that automatically exclude the papillary muscles and trabeculae from the blood volume by classifying the interior grey values of the endocardial contours to estimate corrected areas for summation with Simpson's Rule. Classification is performed using thresholding, hard clipping and error-function clipping, respectively. An evaluation of our methods on 69 clinical data sets showed that our methods provide significantly different results for the end diastolic volume, the end systolic volume, the stroke volume and the ejection fraction, with respect to conventional methods. Furthermore, the difference between our methods was found to be not significant.