title: Extracting Cardiac Myofiber Orientations from High Frequency Ultrasound Images.
abstract: Cardiac myofiber plays an important role in stress mechanism during heart beating periods. The orientation of myofibers decides the effects of the stress distribution and the whole heart deformation. It is important to image and quantitatively extract these orientations for understanding the cardiac physiological and pathological mechanism and for diagnosis of chronic diseases. Ultrasound has been wildly used in cardiac diagnosis because of its ability of performing dynamic and noninvasive imaging and because of its low cost. An extraction method is proposed to automatically detect the cardiac myofiber orientations from high frequency ultrasound images. First, heart walls containing myofibers are imaged by B-mode high frequency (>20 MHz) ultrasound imaging. Second, myofiber orientations are extracted from ultrasound images using the proposed method that combines a nonlinear anisotropic diffusion filter, Canny edge detector, Hough transform, and K-means clustering. This method is validated by the results of ultrasound data from phantoms and pig hearts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Xulei
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Qin
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Zhibin
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Cong
authors.affiliation: Department of Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Rong
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: Department of Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Ming
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Shen
authors.affiliation: Department of Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Mary B
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Wagner
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Kishbom
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, GA ; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology ; Department of Mathematics & Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Baowei
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Fei
keywords: Cardiac myofiber orientation; Denoising; Heart; High frequency ultrasound imaging; Nonlinear anisotropic diffusion filter; Orientation extraction