Automatic Determination Of Field Of View In Cardiac MRI

A system for automatically determining a field of view for performing a subsequent medical imaging study, comprising:

• a medical imaging device for acquiring one or more two-dimensional localizer images and a three-dimensional subsequent medical imaging study;
• a body mask generation unit for thresholding the localizer images and identifying a largest connected component;
• a boundary mask obtaining unit for obtaining a boundary mask from the boundary of the generated body mask;
• and
• a field of view determining unit for fitting a rectangular bounding box to the obtained boundary mask, wherein the determined file of view is used by the medical imaging device in performing the subsequent medical image study.

A computer system comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a program storage device readable by the computer system, embodying a program of instructions executable by the processor to perform method steps for automatically determining a field of view for performing a subsequent medical imaging study, the method comprising:
• acquiring one or more two-dimensional localizer images;
• preprocessing the localizer images;
• generating a body mask by thresholding the preprocessed localizer images and identifying a largest connected component;
• obtaining a boundary mask from the boundary of the generated body mask;
• fitting a rectangular bounding box to the obtained boundary mask;
• and
• using the rectangular bounding box as a field of view for performing a three-dimensional subsequent medical imaging study.