Fast Left Ventricle Tracking in 3D Echocardiographic Data Using Anatomical Affine Optical Flow

Global functional assessment remains a central part of the diagnostic process in daily cardiology practice. Furthermore, real-time 3D echocardiography has been shown to offer superior performance in the assessment of global functional indices, such as stroke volume and ejection fraction, over conventional 2D echo. With this in mind, we present a novel method for tracking the left ventricle (LV) in three-dimensional ultrasound data using a global affine motion model. In order to have a valid region for the underlying assumption of nearly homogeneous motion patterns, we introduce an anatomical region of interest which constrains the global affine motion estimation to a neighborhood around the endocardial surface. This is shown to substantially increase the tracking accuracy and robustness, while simultaneously reducing the required computation time. The proposed anatomical formulation of the optical flow problem is compared with a state-of-the-art real-time tracker and provides competitive performance in the estimation of relevant cardiac volumetric indices used in clinical practice.