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Published on: October 2, 2021
Fast left ventricle tracking using localized anatomical affine optical flow
Sandro Queirós1,2,3, João L Vilaça1,4, Pedro Morais1,2,5
1ICVS/3B's-PT Government Associate Laboratory, Braga/Guimarães, Portugal.
Insights
A new fast method for automatic left ventricle (LV) tracking using optical flow improves cardiac function assessment. This technique enhances accuracy and efficiency in clinical cardiology, applicable to various imaging modalities.
Area of Science:
- Cardiology
- Medical Imaging Analysis
- Biomedical Engineering
Background:
- Assessing left ventricle (LV) function is vital in cardiology for diagnosis and treatment.
- Current manual methods for LV function assessment are time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and validate a novel, fast, and automatic methodology for LV tracking.
- To assess global and regional myocardial function more efficiently.
Main Methods:
- Proposed a localized, anatomically constrained affine optical flow method for automatic LV tracking.
- Validated the method on simulated 3D ultrasound, clinical 3D echocardiography, and cardiac MRI data.
- Combined the tracking method with existing segmentation frameworks.
Main Results:
- The method demonstrated accurate LV tracking across all tested databases.
- Outperformed previous tracking strategies in 3D ultrasound and cardiac MRI.
- Achieved smaller biases and narrower limits of agreement for cardiac indices compared to references.
- Showed suitability for online processing, including 3D motion assessment.
Conclusions:
- The novel optical flow-based method provides accurate and efficient automatic LV tracking.
- This approach enhances myocardial function assessment in clinical cardiology.
- The methodology is adaptable for tracking other anatomical structures.
Abstract:
In daily clinical cardiology practice, left ventricle (LV) global and regional function assessment is crucial for disease diagnosis, therapy selection, and patient follow-up. Currently, this is still a time-consuming task, spending valuable human resources. In this work, a novel fast methodology for automatic LV tracking is proposed based on localized anatomically constrained affine optical flow. This novel method can be combined to previously proposed segmentation frameworks or manually delineated surfaces at an initial frame to obtain fully delineated datasets and, thus, assess both global and regional myocardial function. Its feasibility and accuracy were investigated in 3 distinct public databases, namely in realistically simulated 3D ultrasound, clinical 3D echocardiography, and clinical cine cardiac magnetic resonance images. The method showed accurate tracking results in all databases, proving its applicability and accuracy for myocardial function assessment. Moreover, when combined to previous state-of-the-art segmentation frameworks, it outperformed previous tracking strategies in both 3D ultrasound and cardiac magnetic resonance data, automatically computing relevant cardiac indices with smaller biases and narrower limits of agreement compared to reference indices. Simultaneously, the proposed localized tracking method showed to be suitable for online processing, even for 3D motion assessment. Importantly, although here evaluated for LV tracking only, this novel methodology is applicable for tracking of other target structures with minimal adaptations.
