Myocardial motion computation in 4D ultrasound

This paper presents a method for the computation of 3D flow in 4D (3D spatial+time) Transesophageal Echocardiography (4D TEE). 4D echocardiography is the only modality that allows real-time 3D imaging of the heart, at rates that are sufficiently high to characterize the very fast motion of key anatomical structures, such as the mitral and aortic valves or the left ventricle. The method described in this paper relies on a recently introduced variational optical flow approach. We applied the method to estimate the velocity field of myocardium in the left heart. Real intraoperative 4D TEE data was used and the method yielded good quantitative and qualitative preliminary results. This method has many applications, including elastography, biomechanical modeling, and automated diagnostics.