Exploring the left ventricular chamber dynamics in echocardiography images

This work proposes a novel analysis of the left ventricular chamber dynamics from ultrasound 2D videos, in four steps: first the left ventricular chamber is segmented and second a multi-orientation and multi-scale filtering is performed. A third step is the chamber partition in similar number of super-pixels or homogeneous regions. The final step extracts features from the velocity-acceleration phase plane constructed by tracking these regions along the cardiac cycle and estimating their velocity and acceleration. Finally, each case is characterized by dividing the phase plane into three disjoint areas along the radial direction and estimating the density of points per region. This approach was evaluated in actual videos of four subjects, two control and two patients. Results show density means for unhealthy and control as follows: 0.63 and 0.45 for the low motion region, 0.26 and 0.4 for the mid motion region, and 0.1 and 0.1 for the high motion region.