NON-RIGID MOTION IMAGE ANALYSIS

摘要

A method of automatically detecting and tracking the endocardial and epicardial boundaries of the left ventricle in an echocardiographic image sequence. The endocardial boundary is manually located in some frames of the image sequence, a B-spline curve is fitted to the manually located boundary and a shape-space for the deformation of the boundary through the sequence is calculated by a principal component analysis (PCA) of the motion. The location of the endocardial boundary for all frames in the sequences is then predicted using the shape-space and this prediction is adjusted by searching for image features, such as sharp changes in intensity, in the vicinity of the prediction. The amount of movement of the endocardial boundary in each clinically significant segment of the ventricular wall is obtained by measuring the degree of movement of the control points for the spline in that segment, and also monitoring the variation in the amount of movement between the control points for each spline.