Estimation of global parameters for the analysis of left ventricular motion

A method is presented for the extraction of global parameters, such as rotation and deformation matrices and the translation vector, for left ventricular (LV) motion analysis in a 3D space. The global parameters are estimated from the analysis of 3D echocardiographic sequences. The first step is the segmentation of the LV chamber by applying a level-set technique. The second step consists of applying S. Umeyam's (1991) theorem to two LV frames of a cardiac cine-loop: the outputs of this step are the translation vector and the rotation and deformation matrices that characterize the motion between the two analysed frames. From these parameters, the principal axes of deformation, the deformation modules, the rotation angles and also the percentage volume variation between the two frames can be calculated. The results obtained on phantoms demonstrate that the algorithm for the motion analysis is correct. This preliminary study also shows that, on 3D echocardiographic data, the results are acceptable.