Automated interventricular septum thickness measurement from B-mode echocardiograms

Abstract

In this work, we address the problem of automated measurement of the interventricular septum thickness, one of the key parameters in cardiology, from B-mode echocardiograms. The problem is challenging due to high levels of noise, multi modal intensity, weak contrast due to near field haze, and non rigid motion of the septum across frames. We introduce a complete system for automated measurement of septum thickness from B-mode echocardiograms incorporating three main components: a 1D curve evolution algorithm using region statistics for segmenting the septum, a motion clustering method to locate the mitral valve, and a robust method to calculate the septum width from these inputs in accordance with medical standards. Our method effectively handles the challenges of such measurements and runs in near real time. Results on 57 patient recordings showed excellent agreement of the automated measurements with expert manual measurements. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.