Fast block flow tracking of atrial septal defects in 4D echocardiography

We are working to develop beating-heart atrial septal defect (ASD) closure techniques using real-time 3D ultrasound guidance. The major image processing challenges are the low-image quality and the processing of information at high-frame rate. This paper presents comparative results for ASD tracking...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Medical image analysis 2008-08, Vol.12 (4), p.397-412
Main Authors: Linguraru, Marius George, Vasilyev, Nikolay V., Marx, Gerald R., Tworetzky, Wayne, Del Nido, Pedro J., Howe, Robert D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Animals
Atrial septal defect
Block flow
Block matching
Echocardiography
Echocardiography, Four-Dimensional - methods
Echocardiography, Three-Dimensional
Heart Septal Defects, Atrial - diagnostic imaging
Humans
Mutual information
Optical flow
Real-time ultrasound
Swine
Tracking
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Summary:We are working to develop beating-heart atrial septal defect (ASD) closure techniques using real-time 3D ultrasound guidance. The major image processing challenges are the low-image quality and the processing of information at high-frame rate. This paper presents comparative results for ASD tracking in time sequences of 3D volumes of cardiac ultrasound. We introduce a block flow technique, which combines the velocity computation from optical flow for an entire block with template matching. Enforcing adapted similarity constraints to both the previous and first frames ensures optimal and unique solutions. We compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with that of block matching and region-based optical flow on eight in vivo 4D datasets acquired from porcine beating-heart procedures. Results show that our technique is more stable and has higher sensitivity than both optical flow and block matching in tracking ASDs. Computing velocity at the block level, our technique tracks ASD motion at 2 frames/s, much faster than optical flow and comparable in computation cost to block matching, and shows promise for real-time (30 frames/s). We report consistent results on clinical intra-operative images and retrieve the cardiac cycle (in ungated images) from error analysis. Quantitative results are evaluated on synthetic data with maximum tracking errors of 1 voxel.
ISSN:1361-8415
1361-8423
DOI:10.1016/j.media.2007.12.005