Pires Luiz, Sultan Malik Saad, Martins Nelson, Costa Eva, Veiga Diana, Ferreira Manuel Joao, Mattos Sandra, Coimbra Miguel Tavares
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2018 Jul;2018:3582-3585. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2018.8512963.
Rheumatic heart disease is the serious consequence of repeated episodes of acute rheumatic fever. It is the major cause of heart valve damage resulting in morbidity and mortality. Its early detection is considered vital to control the disease's progression. The key manifestations that are visible in the early stages of this disease are changes in the thickness, shape and mobility of the mitral valve leaflets. Echocardiography based screening is sensitive enough to identify these changes in early stages of the disease. In this work, an automatic approach is proposed to measure, quantify and analyze the thickness of the anterior mitral leaflet, in an echocardiographic video. The shape of the anterior mitral leaflet is simplified via morphological skeletonization and spline modelling to get the central line of the leaflet. To analyze the overall thickness from the tip to its base, the anterior mitral leaflet is divided into four quartiles. In ach quartile the thickness is measured as the length of the line segment resulting from the intersection of the contour with the normal direction of the central point of each quartile. Finally, the thickness is analyzed by measuring the variance per quartile, divided by leaflet position (open, straight and closed). The comparison between the normal and pathological leaflets are also presented, exhibiting statistical significant differences in all quartiles, especially near the tip of the leaflet.
风湿性心脏病是急性风湿热反复发作的严重后果。它是导致发病和死亡的心脏瓣膜损害的主要原因。其早期检测对于控制疾病进展至关重要。这种疾病早期可见的关键表现是二尖瓣叶厚度、形状和活动度的变化。基于超声心动图的筛查足够敏感，能够在疾病早期识别这些变化。在这项工作中，提出了一种自动方法，用于在超声心动图视频中测量、量化和分析二尖瓣前叶的厚度。通过形态学骨架化和样条建模简化二尖瓣前叶的形状，以获得瓣叶的中心线。为了分析从瓣尖到瓣基的整体厚度，将二尖瓣前叶分为四个四分位数。在每个四分位数中，厚度测量为轮廓与每个四分位数中心点法线方向交点处线段的长度。最后，通过测量每个四分位数的方差并除以瓣叶位置（开放、伸直和关闭）来分析厚度。还给出了正常瓣叶与病变瓣叶之间的比较，显示出在所有四分位数中均存在统计学显著差异，尤其是在瓣叶尖端附近。
