Numerical methods and workstation for the quantitative analysis of real-time myocardial contrast echocardiography

  • Authors:

  • Feng-rong Sun;Ming-qiang Zhang;Xiao-bo Jia;Xiao-jing Wang;Gui-hua Yao;Yun Zhang

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, China;School of Physical Engineering, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, China;School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, China;Research and Development Center, Toshiba China Co., Ltd., Beijing, China;Cardiology Department, Qilu Hospital of Shandong University, Jinan, China;Cardiology Department, Qilu Hospital of Shandong University, Jinan, China

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

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.