A method for measuring ventricular dimensions from M-mode echocardiograms, includes providing a digitized M-mode echocardiogram image, running a plurality of local classifiers, where each local classifier trained to detect a landmark on either an end-diastole (ED) line or an end-systole (ES) line in the image, recording all possible landmarks detected by the classifiers, where a search range in an N-dimensional parameter space defined by the landmarks for each dimension is reduced to a union of subsets, where each dimension of the parameter space corresponds a landmark, for each combination of possible landmarks, checking if an order of the landmarks is consistent with a known ordering of the landmarks, and if the order is consistent, running a global detector on each consistent combination of landmarks to find a landmark combination with a highest detection probability as a confirmed landmark detection, where the landmarks are used for measuring ventricular dimensions.