2D/3D Echocardiography Frame Rate Enhancement by Means of a Novel Spatio-Temporal Reconstruction Technique

Frame rate, i.e., the number of frames displayed per second, is a crucial aspect in ultrasound imaging. Increasing the frame rate is required in echocardiography because it helps clinicians assess faster heart movements, especially in the valves. Higher frame rates are needed to capture the mechanical characteristics or transitory events of the heart, especially in 3-dimensional (3D) echocardiography. The main objective of this study is to propose a solution for increasing the frame rate of 2D/3D echocardiography. To this end, we propose a post-processing technique based on a novel 2D spatio-temporal interpolation to increase the frame rate. We utilize radial basis functions (RBF) to perform the interpolation. More precisely, we propose a novel intensity variation time surface (IVTS) approach to integrate both temporal and spatial information into the reconstruction. We apply the proposed technique to 2D and 3D echocardiography datasets at the radio frequency (RF) level of the post-processing stage for different down-sampling (DS) rates. The results demonstrate that we can increase the frame rate of 2D/3D echocardiography by a factor 4 while preserving a structural similarity (SSIM) index greater than 0.96 and 0.87, respectively for 2D and 3D imaging.