Non-Contact Assessment of Cardiac Velocity Profiles Using Ultrasound Based Surface Motion Camera: A Feasibility Study

Tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) mode of echocardiography plays a crucial role in diagnosing several cardiac conditions by recording the myocardial contraction velocities. To mitigate the need of experts for performing echocardiography, several studies have proposed the use of Seismocardiogram as an easier alternative to measure the cardiac timings. However, exact correlation with tissue Doppler measured cardiac velocities has not been explored. Moreover, most of the applications only use single channel contact accelerometers on the chest, thus limiting their utility. In this work, we propose the use of a novel airborne ultrasound based surface motion camera (SMC) for non-contact multichannel recording of cardiac induced surface velocities from the chest. Validation study was conducted on 30 healthy subjects with simultaneous recordings of single channel ECG along with the chest surface velocities followed by clinical Echocardiography. The SMC recorded surface velocity waveforms show correlation similarity of over 0.6 with Tissue Doppler velocity waves extracted from the echocardiographic images. Discrete time warping based distance analysis was also performed to quantify their morphological similarity. Quantitative parameters including the peak systolic velocity and amplitude ratio extracted from the chest recordings show a linear correlation (R² greater than 0.8) with that of the TDI values. Additionally, multichannel recording allows visualization of the velocity profiles on the chest and efficiently captures the spatial variations for left ventricular and septal sites. Hence, this new modality shows the potential to be a vital diagnostic technique for non-contact and robust monitoring of the cardio-mechanical functions.