Classical methods of left ventricular contour extraction and preprocessing of echocardiographic images: a review

Abstract

A main objective of digital processing of echocardiographic images is to improve the signal to noise ratio of the video images acquired from the ultrasound equipment along with contour extraction in order to obtain cardiac parameters. We present a review and comparison among the different proposed methods in the current literature for both noise removal and contour extraction of echocardiographic images. It is shown that classical methods do not render good contours and there is a need for a different approach to contour extraction algorithms.