Fully automatic method for detecting center and tracking boundary points in left ventrical echocardiograms

In this paper we present a new fully automatic method to quantify the motion of the left ventricle in a 2D echocardiographic image sequence. The approach is based on a matched filter which is designed to give a strong response at the curved boundary. This type of filter is used to detect boundary points on the left ventricle cavity wall for any selected (tangent) directions with high reliability in the presence of noise. The algorithm is divided into two stages. In the first stage the estimated cavity center point is identified by processing a sequence of frames corresponding to about one half of the heart beat cycle. In the second stage, two boundary points are located in each frame of the image sequence. The algorithm has been applied two different image sequences, a short-axis view and a long axis view, both of which are quite noisy. The results show accurate tracking of specific tangent points on the endocardial boundary, without any user intervention being required.