Automatic LV Feature Detection and Blood-Pool Tracking from Multi-plane TEE Time Series

Multi-plane, 2D TEE images constitute the clinical standard of care for assessment of left ventricle function, as well as for guiding various minimally invasive procedure that rely on intra-operative imaging for real-time visualization. We propose a framework that enables automatic, rapid and accurate endocardial left ventricle feature identification and blood-pool segmentation using a combination of image filtering, graph cut, non-rigid registration-based motion extraction, and 3D LV geometry reconstruction techniques applied to the TEE image series. We evaluate our proposed framework using several retrospective patient tri-plane TEE image sequences and demonstrate comparable results to those achieved by expert manual segmentation using clinical software.