Quality metric for Parasternal Long AXis B-mode echocardiograms

This paper presents a method for automatically estimating the quality of Parasternal Long AXis (PLAX) B-mode echocardiograms. The purpose of the algorithm is to provide live feedback to the user on the quality of the acquired image. The proposed approach uses Generalized Hough Transform to compare the structures derived from the incoming image to a representative atlas, thereby providing a quality metric (PQM). On 133 PLAX images from 35 patients, we show: 1) PQM has high correlation with manual ratings from an expert echocardiographer 2) PQM has high correlation with contrast-to-noise ratio, a traditional indicator of image quality 3) on images with high PQM, error in automatic septal wall thickness measurement is low, and vice versa.