Estimation of 3D cardiac deformation using spatio-temporal elastic registration of non-scanconverted ultrasound data
An Elen, Dirk Loeckx, Hon Fai Choi, Hang Gao, Piet Claus, Frederik Maes, Paul L. Suetens, Jan D’hooge · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
Current ultrasound methods for measuring myocardial strain are often limited to measurements in one or two dimensions. Spatio-temporal elastic registration of 3D cardiac ultrasound data can however be used to estimate the 3D motion and full 3D strain tensor. In this work, the spatio-temporal elastic registration method was validated for both non-scanconverted and scanconverted images. This was done using simulated 3D pyramidal ultrasound data sets based on a thick-walled deforming ellipsoid and an adapted convolution model. A B-spline based frame-to-frame elastic registration method was applied to both the scanconverted and non-scanconverded data sets and the accuracy of the resulting deformation fields was quantified. The mean accuracy of the estimated displacement was very similar for the scanconverted and non-scanconverted data sets and thus, it was shown that 3D elastic registration to estimate the cardiac deformation from ultrasound images can be performed on non-scanconverted images, but that avoiding of the scanconversion step does not significantly improve the results of the displacement estimation.