Projects:AblationScarSegmentation

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Cardiac ablation scar segmentation

Atrial fibrillation is one of the most common heart conditions and can have very serious consequences such as stroke and heart failure. A technique called catheter radio-frequency (RF) ablation has recently emerged as a treatment. It involves burning the cardiac tissue that is responsible for the fibrillation. Even though this technique has been shown to work fairly well on atrial fibrillation patients, repeat procedures are often needed to fully correct the condition because surgeons lack the necessary tools to quickly evaluate the success of the procedure.

We propose a method to automatically segment the scar created by RF ablation in delayed enhancement MR images acquired after the procedure. This provides surgeons with a visualization showing the size, shape and location of the scar, which is information central to evaluating the outcome of the procedure.

Description

We work with two types of images for each patient: MR angiography (MRA) images where the blood pool has a higher intensity than surrounding tissue and post-procedure delayed enhancement MR images (DE-MRI) where a contrast agent has been injected into the patient to enhance the ablation scar. Our approach is to first segment the left atrium in the MRA images using the label fusion algorithm described in [1].

Literature

[1] Nonparametric Mixture Models for Supervised Image Parcellation, M.R. Sabuncu, B.T.T. Yeo, K. Van Leemput, B. Fischl, and P. Golland. PMMIA Workshop at MICCAI 2009.