Anatomical view stabilization of multiple 3D transesophageal echocardiograms

Transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) provides high quality 3D echocardiographic recordings in close proximity to the heart which is beneficial for interventions in the catheterization laboratory (cath lab) for both preprocedural planning and for monitoring the intervention. However, additional training and a certain level of operator expertise are required to master the maneuvering of the TEE probe in order to easily obtain consistent anatomical views. To ease these requirements, an anatomical view stabilization method is proposed. The stabilization method helps to visualize consistent TEE views without the need to repeatably maneuver the probe to the exact same position and orientation. The proposed method was tested on in-vivo data sets acquired from 5 patients pre, during or post intervention in the cath lab. Two validation approaches were performed offline, namely semi-quantitative scoring by two independent trained observers on the consistency of the anatomical views and quantitative measurements of the location and orientation of 3 manually annotated landmark points at the aortic root. The results from both validation approaches showed significant improvement in the user scores and significant reduction in the landmark distances after stabilization. These results show the potential of the proposed method in increasing reproducibility of particular anatomical views in TEE imaging.