Direct Measurement of Myocardial Thickening by Means of Computer Vision
Michael Sühling, EPFL LIB

Meeting • 06 May 2005

Abstract
The quantitative assessment of cardiac motion and deformation is a fundamental concept to evaluate ventricular mal-functioning. The analysis of regional wall thinning and thickening, in particular, allows to identify non-contracting regions of the myocardium and to differentiate active from passive tissue. We introduce a novel image processing technique to measure myocardial motion and deformation from dynamic B-mode echocardiograms. In contrary to existing Tissue-Doppler methods, which are limited to the ultrasonic beam direction, the proposed method yields 2D motion and deformation information. The method was tested on synthetic data sets produced by image warping. It was also applied to a range of clinical echocardiograms. Deformation results from real echocardiograms were in good agreement with the expert echocardiographic reading.