Region-Based Endocardium Tracking on Real-Time Three-Dimensional Ultrasound

Abstract

Abstract-Matrix-phased array transducers for real-time 3-D ultrasound enable fast, noninvasive visualization of cardiac ventricles. Typically, 3-D ultrasound images are semiautomatically segmented to extract the left ventricular endocardial surface at end-diastole and end-systole. Automatic segmentation and propagation of this surface throughout the entire cardiac cycle is a challenging and cumbersome task. If the position of the endocardial surface is provided at one or two time frames during the cardiac cycle, automated tracking of the surface over the remaining time frames could reduce the workload of cardiologists and optimize analysis of 3-D ultrasound data. In this paper, we applied a region-based tracking algorithm to track the endocardial surface between two reference frames that were manually segmented. To evaluate the tracking of the endocardium, the method was applied to 40 open-chest dog datasets with 484 frames in total. Ventricular geometry and volumes derived from region-based endocardial surfaces and manual tracing were quantitatively compared, showing strong correlation between the two approaches. Statistical analysis showed that the errors from tracking were within the range of interobserver variability of manual tracing. Moreover, our algorithm performed well on ischemia datasets, suggesting that the method is robust-to-abnormal wall motion. In conclusion, the proposed optical flow-based surface tracking method is very efficient and accurate, providing dynamic "interpolation" of segmented endocardial surfaces.

Multiview Fusion 3-d Echocardiography: Improving the Information and Quality of Real-Time 3-D Echocardiography

“…In many instances, speckle reduction was used as a preprocessing step (e.g., Angelini et al 2001Angelini et al , 2005Duan et al 2005;Walimbe et al 2006;Zagrodsky et al 2005) for image enhancement before the LV segmentation or tracking because of the presence of high amounts of speckle in the image. In some cases, LV endocardium tracking algorithms were tested on open-chest dogs (Duan et al 2005(Duan et al , 2009 or piglets (Myronenko et al , 2009Song et al 2007) data. However, the image quality of the open-chest dog or piglet data can be significantly better than routine clinical human heart images.…”

Dense myocardial motion from 4D ultrasound: Comparative performance evaluation

“…correlationbased motion flow, so that we could compare the performance to our method when applied to identical data. The technique, demonstrated in [11], computes the cross-correlation coefficient r across a given search window centered around every 5×5×5 volume according to the following equation:…”

In the Spotlight: Biomedical Imaging

“…Real-time 3-D echocardiography offers an efficient way to capture complex 3-D dynamic motion of the heart. Over the past five years, commercial 4-D ultrasound systems have been developed by Philips Medical Systems (Andover, MA) in the SONOS 7500, followed by the iE33 model, GE Vivid 7 and E9, Siemens SC2000 and Toshiba Artida [18]. Dynamic cardiac metrics, including myocardial strain and displacement, can provide a quantitative approach to evaluate cardiac function [18]- [23], wall motion and ischemia.…”