Estimating regional cardiac function using 3D ultrasound imaging.

Echocardiography plays a leading role in routine clinical practice for the objective assessment of regional cardiac function by measuring cardiac wall motion and deformation (i.e. strain). With advances of transducer technology, three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound (US) acquisitions now offer the possibility to improve and expand on the diagnostic capabilities of the traditional two-dimensional (2D) US images. Nevertheless, the large amount of image data increases computational load, and their limited temporal and spatial resolution compared to 2D images makes tracking tissue challenging. The development of advanced image processing strategies able to cope with these challenging conditions would therefore be beneficial. Non-rigid image registration has been shown a viable technique for regional cardiac function estimation. This method has been validated in an in-vitro experimental setup using deformable tissue-mimicking phantoms and in an open-chest animal setting. The purpose of this project is to further explore its clinical potential by further developing and applying the method on 3D US data from a multi-center clinical study (involving almost 600 patients). Reference strain data from core-lab (i.e. state of the art) analysis of Dopper, 2D speckle tracking and tagged MRI is also available. Comparing our technique with these references will provide further valorisation.

Keywords:Ultrasound, Cardiac, Valorisation, Clinical, Non-rigid registration, Strain

Disciplines:Cardiac and vascular medicine