A Method for the Dynamic Analysis of the Heart Using a Lyapounov Based Denoising Algorithm

Heart tracking in ultrasound sequences is a difficult task due to speckle noise, low SNR and lack of contrast. Therefore it is usually difficult to obtain robust estimates of the heart cavities since feature detectors produce a large number of outliers. This paper presents an algorithm which combines two main operations: i) a novel denoising algorithm based on the Lyapounov equation and ii) a robust tracker, recently proposed by the authors, based on a model of the outlier features. Experimental results are provided, showing that the proposed algorithm is computationally efficient and leads to accurate estimates of the left ventricle during the cardiac cycle