Evaluation of cardiac motion in bi-dimensional echocardiography

Two tracking methods based on matching techniques were used to detect the motion of ventricular walls in cardiac echocardiographic images. Two types of Regions of Interest (ROI) were selected. The first based on tracking blocks of pixels using Sum of Absolute Differences (SAD) and the Correlation Coefficient (CORR), as matching criteria. The second based on gray profile cross-sections along an axis, that passes through the point of interest. In this other case, Covariance (COV) and Correlation Coefficients (CORR) were used as the matching criteria. All four methods were tested with echocardiographic images with different quality levels. The interest points were chosen along the ventricle borders and the myocardial middle zone