Automatic mitral annulus tracking in volumetric ultrasound using non-rigid image registration.

Analysis of mitral annular dynamics plays an important role in the diagnosis and selection of optimal valve repair strategies, but remains cumbersome and time-consuming if performed manually. In this paper we propose non-rigid image registration to automatically track the annulus in 3D ultrasound images for both normal and pathological valves, and compare the performance against manual tracing. Relevant clinical properties such as annular area, circumference and excursion could be extracted reliably by the tracking algorithm. The root-mean-square error, calculated as the difference between the manually traced landmarks (18 in total) and the automatic tracking, was 1.96 ± 0.46 mm over 10 valves (5 healthy and 5 diseased) which is within the clinically acceptable error range.