[Automatic search for the best cross-sections of the three-dimensional ultrasound image of heart by template matching].

Now real-time three-dimensional echocardiography (RT3DE) is an important tool to diagnose the complex congenital heart malformation. However, searching the cross-sections to view the cardiac anomalies in a three-dimensional ultrasound image of the heart by hand on the RT3DE system is time consuming, not repeatable, and easy to miss some places. In order to improve the existing diagnostic tool, we adopted the methods based on template matching for automatically finding the best cross-sections which are defined by Sun Kun et al. to view the cardiac anomalies in RT3DE's full-volume data. Among the methods is the entropy correlation coefficient which measured the similarity of the best cross-sections with the highest accuracy. The automatic search for these cross-sections is much quicker than the manual search. And with good repeatability it will make good preparation for the subsequent computer-aided diagnosis such as measure and registration, which is significant for the diagnosis of the complex congenital heart malformation.