Correlation-based discrimination between cardiac tissue and blood for segmentation of the left ventricle in 3D echocardiographic images

Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS), 2012 IEEE International , 7-10 October 2012, Dresden The aim of this study was to investigate the merit of using temporal cross-correlation between subsequent echo volumes for discriminating blood and myocardial tissue, to facilitate automated segmentation of 3D echocardiographic images over the entire cardiac cycle. Because of poor echogenicity contrast between blood and myocardial tissue in some regions and the presence of speckle noise, automated segmentation is challenging. For patients with a congenital heart disease, segmentation should rely on echo features solely as incorporation of a priori knowledge of the shape of the heart is undesirable. Therefore, we analyzed the performance of a 3D iterative cross-correlation algorithm to obtain optimal contrast of maximum cross-correlation (MCC) values between blood and myocardial tissue in all phases of the cardiac cycle. Both contrast and boundary-gradient quality measures were assessed to optimize the MCC-values with respect to signal choice (radiofrequency (RF) data or envelope data) and axial window size. Results in 3D echocardiographic image sequences of five healthy children demonstrate that the use of envelope data outperformed the use of RF-data in terms of optimal blood-myocardium CNR, Overlap and Acutance, in all phases of the cardiac cycle (