Quantitative Assessment of Left Ventricular Myocardial Motion Using Shape-Constraint Elastic Link Model

We propose a novel technique to track the motion of the left ventricular myocardium on a sequence of transthoracic two-dimensional echocardiogram. Although the proposed method is generally based on the traditional correlation based motion tracking, the tracking accuracy and stability are improved by the introduction of new objective function. In our method, the objective function is defined from the model where multiple Regions of Interest (ROIs) are connected to each other with elastic links. The elastic links reflect both elastic and shape properties of myocardium. The proposed method is implemented and evaluated using ten clinical subjects. The experimental results show that the tracking accuracy of the proposed method is higher than that of the conventional method.