Spatiotemporal registration of multiple three-dimensional echocardiographic recordings for enhanced field of view imaging

Abstract

The use of three-dimensional (3-D) echocardiography is limited by signal dropouts and narrow field of view. Data compounding is proposed as a solution to overcome these limitations by combining multiple 3-D recordings to form a wide field of view. The first step of the solution requires registration between the recordings both in the spatial and temporal dimension for dynamic organs such as the heart. Accurate registration between the individual echo recordings is crucial for the quality of compounded volumes. A temporal registration method based on a piecewise one-dimensional cubic B-spline in combination with multiscale iterative Farnebäck optic flow method for spatial registration was described. The temporal registration method was validated on in vivo data sets with annotated timing of mitral valve opening. The spatial registration method was validated using in vivo data and compared to registration with Procrustes analysis using manual contouring as a benchmark. The spatial accuracy was assessed in terms of mean of absolute distance and Hausdorff distance between the left ventricular contours. The results showed that the temporal registration accuracy is in the range of half the time resolution of the echo recordings and the achieved spatial accuracy of the proposed method is comparable to manual registration.

Multi-View 3-D Fusion Echocardiography: Enhancing Clinical Feasibility with a Novel Processing Technique

“…3-D fusion by registration has been successfully applied to fuse 3-D data sets by several groups (Hill et al 2001;Grau et al 2007;Sra 2008;Gooding et al 2010;Szmigielski et al 2010;Rajpoot et al 2011b;Bersvendsen et al 2016;Danudibroto et al 2016;Peressutti et al 2017). However, on its own, registration is of limited value, because contributing data sets need to demonstrate a significant degree of overlap.…”

“…Several studies, the majority of them pre-clinical, have examined various M3DFE protocols. These studies have demonstrated improvements in parameters such as FOV, EBD, contrast, contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and perception of imaging artifacts (Soler et al 2005;Szmigielski et al 2010;Rajpoot et al 2011b;Yao et al 2011;Carminati et al 2015;Danudibroto et al 2016;Punithakumar et al 2016a;Peressutti et al 2017). However, these studies also show areas for improvement-for example, in accurate alignment of the 3-D data sets and feasibility.…”