Automatic extraction of heart contour using SNAKES

Recently, as sophisticated medical instruments have been developed, the internal state of a human body has become well-known. In particular, in the examination of heart, non-surgical and non-intrusion ultrasonic diagnostics are generally utilized. However, the diagnosis depends on the doctor's subjectivity and experience. Furthermore, the doctor's burden increases because the contour of the heart is extracted by manual operations. Therefore, the development of a system that offers objective information in addition to a subjective judgment of the doctor by extracting and analyzing quantitative information from image analysis by computers is necessary. In this paper, the contour of the chamber wall is extracted by using an active contour model SNAKES as a preprocessing of the heart disease detection. The contour has been extracted by using SNAKES of the expasion model from the inner surface of heart.