Numerical methods and workstation for the quantitative analysis of real-time myocardial contrast echocardiography.
Using the quantitative analysis of real-time myocardial contrast echocardiography (RT MCE), clinicians can assess the myocardial perfusion of patients, noninvasively and accurately. We designed a workstation to assist clinicians to automatically implement the accurate analysis of RT MCE. The workstation can compute some hemodynamic parameters of myocardial microcirculation, e.g., myocardial blood flow, myocardial blood flow mean velocity, and myocardial blood volume. Our new methods involved in the quantitative analysis of RT MCE are summarized as follows. 1) A novel orthogonal array optimization (OAO) technique was proposed and used to estimate the unknown parameters of the nonlinear model to guarantee numerical stability. 2) Brox's coarse-to-fine warping optical flow technique was employed to automatically track the region of interest located inside the myocardial area to ensure the accuracy of the quantitative analysis. Finally, we illustrate some examples of clinical studies to indicate the effectiveness of the system and the reliability of the methods.
Sun
Feng-rong
FR
School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan 250100, China. sunfr@sdu.edu.cn
Zhang
Ming-qiang
MQ
Jia
Xiao-bo
XB
Wang
Xiao-jing
XJ
Yao
Gui-hua
GH
Zhang
Yun
Y
D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D003287:Contrast Media; D004285:Dogs; D004452:Echocardiography / Q000379:methods*; D006321:Heart / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D006439:Hemodynamics; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D045423:Microbubbles; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D012044:Regression Analysis
D003287:Contrast Media