Review of myocardial motion estimation methods from optical flow tracking on ultrasound data

Quantitative analysis of cardiac motion is of great clinical interest in assessment of ventricular function. Ultrasound imaging, especially matrix transducers acquiring real-time three dimensional data, provide valuable information, from which quantitative measures of cardiac function can be extracted via optical flow computation. Such analysis requires tracking of the image brightness patterns with underlying assumptions of visual persistency. We present a review of myocardial motion analysis on cardiac ultrasound, based on optical-flow computation, with phantom and clinical evaluations for segmental wall assessment and motion features quantification.