Dynamic cardiac information from optical flow using four dimensional ultrasound.

Quantitative analysis of cardiac motion is of great clinical interest in assessing ventricular function. Real-time 3-D (RT3D) ultrasound transducers provide valuable three-dimensional information, from which quantitative measures of cardiac function can be extracted. Such analysis requires segmentation and visual tracking of the left ventricular endocardial border. We present results based on correlation of four-dimensional optical flow motion for temporal tracking of ventricular borders in three dimensional ultrasound data. A displacement field is computed from the optical flow output, and a framework for the computation of dynamic cardiac information is introduced. The method was applied to a clinical data set from a heart transplant patient and dynamic measurements agreed with physiological knowledge as well as experimental results.