Endocardial tracking in contrast echocardiography using optical flow

Abstract

Myocardial Contrast Echocardiography (MCE) is a recent technique that allows to measure regional perfusion in the cardiac wall. Segmentation of MCE sequences would allow simultaneous evaluation of perfusion and wall motion. This paper deals with the application of partial differential equations (PDE) for tracking the endocardial wall. We use a variational optical flow method which we solve numerically with a multigrid approach adapted to the MCE modality. The data sequence are first smoothed and a hierarchical-iterative procedure is implemented to correctly estimate the flow field magnitude. The method is tested on several sequences showing promising results for automatic wall tracking. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.