Cardiac motion analysis from ultrasound sequences using nonrigid registration: validation against Doppler tissue velocity.
Early detection of cardiac motion abnormalities is one of the main goals of quantitative cardiac image processing. This article presents a new method to compute the 2-D myocardial motion parameters from gray-scale 2-D echocardiographic sequences, making special emphasis on the validation of the proposed technique in comparison with Doppler tissue imaging. Myocardial motion is computed using a frame-to-frame nonrigid registration technique on the whole sequence. The key feature of our method is the use of an analytical representation of the myocardial displacement based on a semilocal parametric model of the deformation using Bsplines. Myocardial motion analysis is performed to obtain displacement, velocity and strain parameters. Robustness and speed are achieved by introducing a multiresolution optimization strategy. To validate the method, velocity measurements in three different regions-of-interest in the septum have been compared with those obtained with Doppler tissue velocity in healthy and pathologic subjects. Regression and Bland-Altman analysis show very good agreement between the two different approaches, with the great advantage that the new method overcomes the angle-dependency limitations of the Doppler techniques, providing both longitudinal and radial measurements.
Ledesma-Carbayo
M J
MJ
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain. mledesma@die.upm.es
Mahía-Casado
P
P
Santos
A
A
Pérez-David
E
E
García-Fernández
M A
MA
Desco
M
M
D004452:Echocardiography / Q000379:methods*; D015150:Echocardiography, Doppler; D006346:Heart Septum / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D016014:Linear Models; D009068:Movement; D009200:Myocardial Contraction