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This paper introduces a robust 2-D cardiac motion estimation method. The problem is formulated as an energy minimization with an optical flow-based data fidelity term and two regularization terms imposing spatial smoothness and the sparsity of the motion field in an appropriate cardiac motion dictionary. Robustness to outliers, such as imaging artefacts and anatomical motion boundaries, is introduced using robust weighting functions for the data fidelity term as well as for the spatial and sparse regularizations. The motion fields and the weights are computed jointly using an iteratively re-weighted minimization strategy. The proposed robust approach is evaluated on synthetic data and realistic simulation sequences with available ground-truth by comparing the performance with state-of-the-art algorithms. Finally, the proposed method is validated using two sequences of in vivo images. The obtained results show the interest of the proposed approach for 2-D cardiac ultrasound imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new method for cardiac motion estimation in 2-D ultrasound images. The motion estimation problem is formulated as an energy minimization, whose data fidelity term is built using the assumption that the images are corrupted by multiplicative Rayleigh noise. In addition to a classical spatial smoothness constraint, the proposed method exploits the sparse properties of the cardiac motion to regularize the solution via an appropriate dictionary learning step. The proposed method is evaluated on one data set with available ground-truth, including four sequences of highly realistic simulations. The approach is also validated on both healthy and pathological sequences of in vivo data. We evaluate the method in terms of motion estimation accuracy and strain errors and compare the performance with state-of-the-art algorithms. The results show that the proposed method gives competitive results for the considered data. Furthermore, the in vivo strain analysis demonstrates that meaningful clinical interpretation can be obtained from the estimated motion vectors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

• A general learning-based decomposition model suitable for fusing images from various imaging modalities is proposed. • The multimodal images are decomposed into correlated and uncorrelated components. • A CDL method based on simultaneous sparse approximation is proposed for estimating the correlated features. • The uncorrelated components are estimated using a Pearson correlation-based constraint. This paper presents a multimodal image fusion method using a novel decomposition model based on coupled dictionary learning. The proposed method is general and can be used for a variety of imaging modalities. In particular, the images to be fused are decomposed into correlated and uncorrelated components using sparse representations with identical supports and a Pearson correlation constraint, respectively. The resulting optimization problem is solved by an alternating minimization algorithm. Contrary to other learning-based fusion methods, the proposed approach does not require any training data, and the correlated features are extracted online from the data itself. By preserving the uncorrelated components in the fused images, the proposed fusion method significantly improves on current fusion approaches in terms of maintaining the texture details and modality-specific information. The maximum-absolute-value rule is used for the fusion of correlated components only. This leads to an enhanced contrast-resolution without causing intensity attenuation or loss of important information. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves superior performance in terms of both visual and objective evaluations compared to state-of-the-art image fusion methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]