Multivariate mixture model for myocardial segmentation combining multi-source images.

The author proposes a method for simultaneous registration and segmentation of multi-source images, using the multivariate mixture model (MvMM) and maximum of log-likelihood (LL) framework. Specifically, the method is applied to the myocardial segmentation combining the complementary information from multi-sequence (MS) cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images. For the image misalignment and incongruent data, the MvMM is formulated with transformations and is further generalized for dealing with the hetero-coverage multi-modality images (HC-MMIs). The segmentation of MvMM is performed in a virtual common space, to which all the images and misaligned slices are simultaneously registered. Furthermore, this common space can be divided into a number of sub-regions, each of which contains congruent data, thus the HC-MMIs can be modeled using a set of conventional MvMMs. Results show that MvMM obtained significantly better performance compared to the conventional approaches and demonstrated good potential for scar quantification as well as myocardial segmentation. The generalized MvMM has also demonstrated better robustness in the incongruent data, where some images may not fully cover the region of interest, and the full coverage can only be reconstructed combining the images from multiple sources.