Deformable regions of interest with multiple points for tissue tracking in echocardiography.

Abstract

By tracking echocardiography images more accurately and stably, we can better assess myocardial functions. In this paper, we propose a new tracking method with deformable Regions of Interest (ROIs) aiming at rational pattern matching. For this purpose we defined multiple tracking points for an ROI and regarded these points as nodes in the Meshfree Method to interpolate displacement fields. To avoid unreasonable distortion of the ROI caused by noise and perturbation in echo images, we introduced a stabilization technique based on a nonlinear strain energy function. Examples showed that the combination of our new tracking method and stabilization technique provides competitive and stable tracking.