Sun Feng-rong, Zhang Ming-qiang, Jia Xiao-bo, Wang Xiao-jing, Yao Gui-hua, Zhang Yun
School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan 250100, China.
IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed. 2010 Sep;14(5):1204-10. doi: 10.1109/TITB.2010.2040395. Epub 2010 Feb 2.
Using the quantitative analysis of real-time myocardial contrast echocardiography (RT MCE), clinicians can assess the myocardial perfusion of patients, noninvasively and accurately. We designed a workstation to assist clinicians to automatically implement the accurate analysis of RT MCE. The workstation can compute some hemodynamic parameters of myocardial microcirculation, e.g., myocardial blood flow, myocardial blood flow mean velocity, and myocardial blood volume. Our new methods involved in the quantitative analysis of RT MCE are summarized as follows. 1) A novel orthogonal array optimization (OAO) technique was proposed and used to estimate the unknown parameters of the nonlinear model to guarantee numerical stability. 2) Brox's coarse-to-fine warping optical flow technique was employed to automatically track the region of interest located inside the myocardial area to ensure the accuracy of the quantitative analysis. Finally, we illustrate some examples of clinical studies to indicate the effectiveness of the system and the reliability of the methods.
