Dense myocardial motion from 4D ultrasound: Comparative performance evaluation

This paper is an extension of our ISBI 2011 work, where we proposed a novel variational approach to estimate dense myocardial velocity fields from 4D ultrasound (4DUS). In this paper, we present a thorough performance evaluation of our method by comparing it with the primary method of record, which relies on cross-correlation. Our comparative performance evaluation uses several data sources, including (a) real intraoperative 4D transesophageal sequences, (b) synthetic sequences, and (c) phantom sequences. Results from qualitative and quantitative evaluations show an improvement in error for the variational over the cross-correlation motion estimation method.