Automated extraction of serial myocardial borders from M-mode echocardiograms

A method is presented for the automated extraction of myocardial borders in M-mode echocardiograms. The successive steps of processing are: preprocessing for noise reduction, enhancement of border characteristics using a set of suitably chosen matched filters, and final extraction of border points by searching for optimal paths along the time axis. During the last step of processing, the contribution of each elementary border element is characterised by a normalized correlation coefficient. The optimal path, defined as the one that maximizes the sum of all elementary contributions, is determined efficiently using dynamic programming. An alternative approach uses a maximum tracking procedure whose performances are improved by utilizing a local model to predict the position of the next border point. Experimental examples are presented and the performance of both border extraction algorithms are compared.