Quantification of LV volumes with 4D real-time echocardiography

This paper presents a new 4D (3D+Time) expansion of echocardiographic volumes on complex exponential wavelet-like basis functions called Brushlets (see F. Meyer and R.R. Coifman, "Brushlets: a tool for directional image analysis and image compression," Applied and computational harmonic analysis, vol. 4, p. 147-87, 1997). Brushlet functions offer good localization in time and frequency and decompose a signal into distinct patterns of oriented textures, invariant to intensity and contrast range. Automatic left ventricle (LV) endocardial border detection is carried out in the transform domain where speckle noise is attenuated while cardiac structure location is preserved. Quantitative validation and clinical applications of this new spatio-temporal analysis tool are reported with results on phantoms and clinical data sets to quantify LV volumes and ejection fraction.