Automated interpretation of cardiac scintigrams

The purpose of this study was to develop an automated method for the segmentation of the heart in a 3-D cardiac scintigram. This is immediately useful for eliminating a manual step in a previous version of a decision support system. The automatic segmentation method uses a statistical 3D-model, inspired by Active Shape, which locates the base and apex automatically from a cardiac scintigram. Key features of this algorithm are that it can handle cases where there is no or very little activity in the apex and also if there axe additional parts of the heart where there is little activity. The algorithm has been tested on approximately 2000 cardiac scintigrams.