Automated quantification of mitral regurgitation by classifier design for contrast 2D echocardiography

The authors describe a classifier design and its performance validation for quantitative assessment of mitral regurgitation (MR) in intracavity contrast two-dimensional echocardiograms, based on microbubble motion analysis. A hierarchical linear classifier was built for four class MR classification using a training set of 202 contrast echocardiographic image sequences and some features corresponding to the changes of the microbubble quantity and distribution. After the classifier´s performance was evaluated in test sets with a rotation method, the authors obtained the less biased performance estimates of respectively 61.8% and 90.5% for correct classification and partially correct classification, which show the applicability and potential usefulness of automated MR assessment