Comparing optical-flow based methods for quantification of myocardial deformations on RT3D ultrasound

Quantitative analysis of cardiac motion is of great clinical interest in assessing ventricular function. Real-time 3-D (RT3D) ultrasound transducers provide valuable three-dimensional information, from which quantitative measures of cardiac function can be extracted. Such analysis requires segmentation and visual tracking of the left ventricular endocardial border. Previously, we presented a method based on four-dimensional optical flow motion estimation for temporal tracking of ventricular borders in RT3D ultrasound. A myocardial displacement field and dynamic cardiac metrics were computed by interpolating the boundary tracking results. In this paper, we propose three additional methods for deriving dynamic cardiac information from tracking ventricular surfaces and demonstrate these methods on a clinical dataset