A New Technique for the Estimation of Cardiac Motion in Echocardiography Based on Transverse Oscillations: a preliminary evaluation in silico and a feasibility demonstration in vivo

Martino Alessandrini (1) , Adrian Basarab (2, 3) , Loic Boussel (4) , Xinxin Guo (1) , André Serusclat (5) , Denis Friboulet (6) , Denis Kouamé (2) , Olivier Bernard (6) , Hervé Liebgott (1)

1 Imagerie Ultrasonore
2 IRIT-TCI - Traitement et Compréhension d’Images
3 UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier
4 MOTIVATE - Imagerie et modélisation Vasculaires, Thoraciques et Cérébrales
5 HCL - Hospices Civils de Lyon
6 Images et Modèles

Quantification of regional myocardial motion and deformation from cardiac ultrasound is fostering considerable research efforts. Despite the tremendous improvements done in the field, all existing approaches still face a common limitation which is intrinsically connected with the formation of the ultrasound images. Specifically, the reduced lateral resolution and the absence of phase information in the lateral direction highly limit the accuracy in the computation of lateral displacements. In this context, this paper introduces a novel setup for the estimation of cardiac motion with ultrasound. The framework includes an unconventional beamforming technique and a dedicated motion estimation algorithm. The beamformer aims at introducing phase information in the lateral direction by producing transverse oscillations. The estimator directly exploits the phase information in the two directions by decomposing the image into two 2-D single-orthant analytic signals. An in silico evaluation of the proposed framework is presented on five ultra-realistic simulated echocardiographic sequences, where the proposed motion estimator is contrasted against other two phase-based solutions exploiting the presence of transverse oscillations and against block-matching on standard images. An implementation of the new beamforming strategy on a research ultrasound platform is also shown along with a preliminary in vivo evaluation on one healthy subject.

Mots clés: Echocardiography; Multidimensional Hilbert Transform; Ultrasonic Imaging; Cardiology; Medical Image Processing; Oscillators; Radio-Frequency (RF) Signal; Transverse Oscillations; Latreal Displacements; Regional Myocardial Deformation; Cardiac Strain; Cardiac Ultrasound; Array Signal Processing; Reduced Lateral Resolution; Cardiac Motion Estimation; Motion Estimation; Beamforming Technique; Phase Based Solution; Regional Myocardial Motion

Domaines: Synthèse d'image et réalité virtuelle [cs.GR]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Martino Alessandrini, Adrian Basarab, Loic Boussel, Xinxin Guo, André Serusclat, et al.. A New Technique for the Estimation of Cardiac Motion in Echocardiography Based on Transverse Oscillations: a preliminary evaluation in silico and a feasibility demonstration in vivo. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2014, vol. 33 (n° 5), pp. 1148-1162. ⟨10.1109/TMI.2014.2305846⟩. ⟨hal-01117833⟩