Bimodal myocardial motion analysis from B-mode and tissue Doppler ultrasound

We present a new method for estimating heart motion from two-dimensional echocardiographic sequences by exploiting two ultrasound modalities: B-mode and tissue Doppler. The algorithm estimates a two-dimensional velocity field locally by using a spatial affine velocity model inside a sliding window. Within each window, we minimize a local cost function that is composed of two quadratic terms: an optical flow constraint that involves the B-mode data and a constraint that enforces the agreement of the velocity field with the directional tissue Doppler measurements. The relative influence of the two different modalities to the resulting solution is controlled by an adjustable weighting parameter. Robustness is achieved by a coarse-to-fine multi-scale approach.