Pre-processing for 3D echocardiography

3D-Echo provides more complete information about cardiac structures with respect to traditional 2D-Echo. A correct interpretation of 3D data is often made difficult by the high level of noise necessarily linked to the procedure of acquisition. Traditional filtering techniques do not enable either the noise to be eliminated or the edges to be maintained. It is therefore essential that processing is able to distinguish the noise from the edges of the various cardiac structures; this is possible by means of the filtering technique based on 3D multiscale anisotropic diffusion. Since in echocardiography the time sequence of the frames provides clinically significant information, the filtering technique has been extended to 3D+time to process sequences of 3D data