Region of Interest Tracking in 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, People's Republic of China 250100;School of Physical Engineering, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, People's Republic of China 273165;School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, People's Republic of China 250100;Research and Development Center, Toshiba (China) Co., Ltd., Beijing, People's Republic of China 100738;Cardiology Department, Qilu Hospital of Shandong University, Jinan, People's Republic of China 250012;Cardiology Department, Qilu Hospital of Shandong University, Jinan, People's Republic of China 250012

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Medical Systems
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

The real-time myocardial contrast echocardiography (RT MCE) is a new echocardiography technology, which allows clinicians to noninvasively evaluate the perfusion of myocardial capillary of patients, using the quantitative analysis of RT MCE. But the accurate analysis requires tracking the position of region of interest (ROI) within the myocardial area, so as to compensate for the translation or rotation offsets, which are due to such uncontrollable factors as heart motion. We used diamond search method and Brox's coarse-to-fine warping optical flow technique for this ROI tracking problem. We validated our methods by comparing the quantitative analysis results of RT MCE using our methods with those using Lucas & Kanade's optical flow technique, which had been report to be accurate enough for this ROI tracking. We finally present some examples of animal experiment to show the effectiveness and the clinical application value of our ROI tracking methods.