title: Phase-aware echocardiogram stabilization using keyframes.
abstract: This paper presents an echocardiogram stabilization method designed to compensate for unwanted auxilliary motion. Echocardiograms contain both deformable cardiac motion and approximately rigid motion due to a number of factors. The goal of this work is to stabilize the video, while preserving the informative deformable cardiac motion. Our approach incorporates synchronized side information, extracted from electrocardiography (ECG), which provides a proxy for cardiac phase. To avoid the computational expense of pairwise alignment, we propose an efficient strategy for keyframe selection, formulated as a submodular optimization problem. We evaluate our approach quantitatively on synthetic data and demonstrate its benefit as a preprocessing step for two common echocardiogram applications: denoising and left ventricle segmentation. In both cases, preprocessing with our method improved the performance compared to no preprocessing or other alignment approaches.
authors.affiliation: IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, United States. Electronic address: wuhu@us.ibm.com.
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Department of General Surgery, Carolinas Medical Center, United States.
authors.forename: Toan T
authors.initials: TT
authors.lastname: Huynh
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, United States.
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Souvenir
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D004452:Echocardiography / Q000379:methods*; D006352:Heart Ventricles / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D006801:Humans
keywords: Echocardiography; Image registration; Submodular optimization; Video stabilization