Greedy framework for optical flow tracking of myocardium contours

Optical flow (OF) tracking of the myocardium contours has a potential in segmenting the myocardium in time sequences of cardiac medical images. Nevertheless, to estimate the displacement field of the contour points, a number of assumptions are required to solve an under-determined set of optical flow equations. In this work, a new framework is proposed to solve the OF tracking problem using greedy optimisation algorithm. The new framework allows different types of constraints such as motion invariance, shape and topology to be applied in a unified way. The developed methods are applied to a publicly-available cardiac magnetic resonance imaging dataset containing image sequences for 33 patients. Quantitative evaluation of the results shows high potential of the methods to accurately track and segment the myocardium contours. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2014.