Region of interest tracking in real-time myocardial contrast echocardiography.

The real-time myocardial contrast echocardiography (RT MCE) is a new echocardiography technology, which allows clinicians to noninvasively evaluate the perfusion of myocardial capillary of patients, using the quantitative analysis of RT MCE. But the accurate analysis requires tracking the position of region of interest (ROI) within the myocardial area, so as to compensate for the translation or rotation offsets, which are due to such uncontrollable factors as heart motion. We used diamond search method and Brox's coarse-to-fine warping optical flow technique for this ROI tracking problem. We validated our methods by comparing the quantitative analysis results of RT MCE using our methods with those using Lucas & Kanade's optical flow technique, which had been report to be accurate enough for this ROI tracking. We finally present some examples of animal experiment to show the effectiveness and the clinical application value of our ROI tracking methods.