Wall position and thickness estimation from sequences of echocardiographic images

Presents a new method for endocardial (inner) and epicardial (outer) contour estimation from sequences of echocardiographic images. The framework herein introduced is fine-tuned for parasternal short axis views at the papillary muscle level. The underlying model is probabilistic; it captures the relevant features of the image generation physical mechanisms and of the heart morphology. Contour sequences are assumed to be two-dimensional noncausal first-order Markov random processes; each variable has a spatial index and a temporal index. The image pixels are modeled as Rayleigh distributed random variables with means depending on their positions (inside endocardium, between endocardium and pericardium, or outside pericardium). The complete probabilistic model is built under the Bayesian framework. As estimation criterion the maximum a posteriori (MAP) is adopted. To solve the optimization problem, one is led to (joint estimation of contours and distributions' parameters), the authors introduce an algorithm herein named iterative multigrid dynamic programming (IMDP). It is a fully data-driven scheme with no ad-hoc parameters. The method is implemented on an ordinary workstation, leading to computation times compatible with operational use. Experiments with simulated and real images are presented.