Combining apical and parasternal views to improve motion estimation in real-time 3D echocardiographic sequences

Real-time 3D echocardiography (RT3DE), while offering obvious advantages over traditional two-dimensional echocardiography, is hampered by its limited image quality. This makes it difficult to apply accurate quantitative analysis tools that fully exploit this modality. We propose to overcome this limitation by combining views from different echocardiographic windows. Following recent publication of a method to register apical and parasternal acquisitions, here we present an algorithm to estimate cardiac motion in RT3DE sequences, using images acquired from both views. The algorithm is based on optical flow, using a variational formulation and a similarity function based on ultrasound physics. Results on simulated and real images are presented, showing the increased accuracy with respect to the same algorithm applied on a single view.