Automatic cardiac flow quantification on 3D volume color Doppler data

Valvular heart diseases are recognized as a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. Accurate quantification of cardiac flow volumes in patients is essential in evaluation of the progression of the disease and in determination of clinical options. Recent advances in the real-time 3D full volume echocardiography have enabled high frame rate acquisition of volumetric color Doppler flow images. In this paper, we propose a fully automated method to quantify the cardiac flow using instantaneous 3D+t ultrasound data. The anatomical information such as mitral annulus and left ventricle outflow tract (LVOT) are detected and tracked automatically accounting for the heart motion. Furthermore, the proposed method automatically detects and tracks the endocardial boundary of the left ventricle (LV) and computes the instantaneous change in LV volume. This information is used to overcome inherent limitation of the color Doppler velocity ambiguity such that de-aliasing parameters are computed and used to correct flow computations. Preliminary results with clinical data presented here agree well with accepted clinical measurements in a quantitative manner. The proposed method is efficient and achieves high speed performance of 0.2 second per volume of ultrasound data.