Estimation of 3D cardiac deformation using spatio-temporal elastic registration of non-scanconverted ultrasound data

Current ultrasound methods for measuring myocardial strain are often limited to measurements in one or two dimensions. Spatio-temporal elastic registration of 3D cardiac ultrasound data can however be used to estimate the 3D motion and full 3D strain tensor. In this work, the spatio-temporal elastic registration method was validated for both non-scanconverted and scanconverted images. This was done using simulated 3D pyramidal ultrasound data sets based on a thick-walled deforming ellipsoid and an adapted convolution model. A B-spline based frame-to-frame elastic registration method was applied to both the scanconverted and non-scanconverded data sets and the accuracy of the resulting deformation fields was quantified. The mean accuracy of the estimated displacement was very similar for the scanconverted and non-scanconverted data sets and thus, it was shown that 3D elastic registration to estimate the cardiac deformation from ultrasound images can be performed on non-scanconverted images, but that avoiding of the scanconversion step does not significantly improve the results of the displacement estimation.Elen A., Loeckx D., Choi H.F., Gao H., Claus P., Maes F., Suetens P., D’hooge J., ''Estimation of 3D cardiac deformation using spatio-temporal elastic registration of non-scanconverted ultrasound data'', SPIE medical imaging 2008 conference : ultrasonic imaging and signal processing, vol. 6920, pp. 69200R-69200R-9, February 17-21, 2008, San Diego, California, USA.status: publishe