# Fully Automatic Segmentation and Objective Assessment of Atrial Scars for Longstanding Persistent Atrial Fibrillation Patients Using Late Gadolinium-Enhanced MRI

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.09529 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09529/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Medical Image Analysis on Left Atrial LGE MRI for Atrial Fibrillation Studies: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09862/) (2021)
- [Recent Advances in Fibrosis and Scar Segmentation from Cardiac MRI: A State-of-the-Art Review and Future Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15707/) (2021)
- [Edge-Enhanced Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Network for Fast MRI with Parallel Imaging Using Multi-view Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05758/) (2021)
- [JAS-GAN: Generative Adversarial Network Based Joint Atrium and Scar Segmentations on Unbalanced Atrial Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00234/) (2021)
- [Multicentre Bi-atrial Segmentation from LGE-MRI for Atrial Fibrillation with a 2D and 3D Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22398/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Purpose: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia and is correlated with increased morbidity and mortality. It is associated with atrial fibrosis, which may be assessed non-invasively using late gadolinium-enhanced (LGE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) where scar tissue is visualised as a region of signal enhancement. In this study, we proposed a novel fully automatic pipeline to achieve an accurate and objective atrial scarring segmentation and assessment of LGE MRI scans for the AF patients. Methods: Our fully automatic pipeline uniquely combined: (1) a multi-atlas based whole heart segmentation (MA-WHS) to determine the cardiac anatomy from an MRI Roadmap acquisition which is then mapped to LGE MRI, and (2) a super-pixel and supervised learning based approach to delineate the distribution and extent of atrial scarring in LGE MRI. Results: Both our MA-WHS and atrial scarring segmentation showed accurate delineations of cardiac anatomy (mean Dice = 89%) and atrial scarring (mean Dice =79%) respectively compared to the established ground truth from manual segmentation. Compared with previously studied methods with manual interventions, our innovative pipeline demonstrated comparable results, but was computed fully automatically. Conclusion: The proposed segmentation methods allow LGE MRI to be used as an objective assessment tool for localisation, visualisation and quantification of atrial scarring.