Using an elastic deformable template for the segmentation of ultrasound cardiac radio frequency images based on the velocity information

In the context of echocardiographic imaging, we investigate the feasibility of segmentation based on the velocity information, estimated by tracking radiofrequency patterns in consecutive frames. We subsequently segment the variance of the velocity by means of a deformable template, which is constrained by an elasticity term and evolves attracted by the edges of the velocity variance. Segmentation of a simulated image and of an entire cardiac sequence proves a good performance of our method. Since the velocity information is complementary with respect to the classically used envelope one, it could be used to increase reliability of the detection of cardiac structure.