title: Tracking of regions-of-interest in myocardial contrast echocardiography.
abstract: Analysis of intramyocardial perfusion by contrast echocardiography provides quantitative parameters for the assessment of ischemic disease. This analysis can be achieved by applying an ultrasound (US) burst of high mechanical index to destroy contrast bubbles, measuring various myocardial refilling parameters from the time curves obtained from regions-of-interest (ROIs) within the myocardial wall. To obtain reliable intensity curves, the position of the ROIs must be tracked to compensate for the heart motion along the sequence. In this work, we studied the use of optical flow techniques for ROI repositioning. Two block-matching and one differential technique were evaluated for this purpose. Performance was measured by comparing the result of automatic tracking with results of ROI repositioning by a human expert. This evaluation was carried out on experimental data from animals as well as on sequences from clinical studies. Results are considered to be accurate enough for clinical purposes, and computation times may allow for a real-time processing if incorporated into a US scanner.
authors.affiliation: Dpto. Ingeniería Electrónica, ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Norberto
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Malpica
authors.forename: Andrés
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Santos
authors.forename: Miguel Angel
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Zuluaga
authors.forename: María J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Ledesma
authors.forename: Esther
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Pérez
authors.forename: Miguel A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: García-Fernández
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Desco
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D003287:Contrast Media; D004452:Echocardiography / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D017202:Myocardial Ischemia / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D010743:Phospholipids; D013459:Sulfur Hexafluoride; D013552:Swine
chemical_list: D003287:Contrast Media; D010743:Phospholipids; C420843:contrast agent BR1; D013459:Sulfur Hexafluoride