Developments towards real-time frame-to-frame automatic contour detection on echocardiograms

An automated contour detection method has been developed for the assessment of left ventricular wall motion from short-axis transesophageal echocardiograms. The method is based on minimum-cost contour detection using an iterative approach and implicit knowledge about left ventricular geometry. The contour detection takes about 4 seconds per image on a 20-MHz Compaq 386. This automated method has been evaluated by comparison of automatically detected contours with contours drawn manually on 480 images. Inter- and intra-observer variabilities were determined for both types of contours. Performance of the manual drawing was only slightly better than automatic detection. This technique is now being extended towards frame-to-frame contour detection. Very promising results were obtained in a pilot study on a high-quality echo sequence.<
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