Queirós Sandro, Vilaça João L, Morais Pedro, Fonseca Jaime C, D'hooge Jan, Barbosa Daniel
ICVS/3B's-PT Government Associate Laboratory, Braga/Guimarães, Portugal.
Lab on Cardiovascular Imaging and Dynamics, Dept. of Cardiovascular Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Int J Numer Method Biomed Eng. 2017 Nov;33(11). doi: 10.1002/cnm.2871. Epub 2017 Apr 11.
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.
在日常临床心脏病学实践中，左心室（LV）整体和局部功能评估对于疾病诊断、治疗选择及患者随访至关重要。目前，这仍是一项耗时的任务，耗费宝贵的人力资源。在这项工作中，基于局部解剖约束仿射光流提出了一种新颖的左心室自动跟踪快速方法。这种新方法可与先前提出的分割框架或初始帧中的手动勾勒表面相结合，以获得完整勾勒的数据集，从而评估整体和局部心肌功能。在3个不同的公共数据库中研究了其可行性和准确性，即逼真模拟的三维超声、临床三维超声心动图和临床电影心脏磁共振图像。该方法在所有数据库中均显示出准确的跟踪结果，证明了其在心肌功能评估中的适用性和准确性。此外，当与先前的最先进分割框架相结合时，在三维超声和心脏磁共振数据中，它均优于先前的跟踪策略，与参考指标相比，能以更小的偏差和更窄的一致性界限自动计算相关心脏指数。同时，所提出的局部跟踪方法显示适用于在线处理，甚至适用于三维运动评估。重要的是，尽管这里仅针对左心室跟踪进行了评估，但这种新颖的方法只需进行最少的调整就适用于其他目标结构的跟踪。
