Spatial discontinuity detection and temporal smoothing for heart-wall motion estimation from TM-mode echocardiographic images

The authors focus on the TM image processing dealing with the left ventricle´s motion in the short axis view. Their goal is an automatic extraction of the endocardial contour over time, in order to compute its motion parameters. The authors´ propose a novel algorithm combining spatial discontinuity detection and temporal smoothing. The discontinuities are extracted from each TM-line, by means of a robust detector which measures the degree of the local non-stationarity of the signal. The ventricle´s cavity is approximately extracted by an adaptive thresholding so as to help the selection of the endocardial contours from the detected set of discontinuity lines. These contours are then approximated by cubic splines. Instantaneous velocities of the heart walls are finally computed by derivating the obtained temporally smooth curves.