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A hybrid approach for tracking borders in echocardiograms

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Abstract

Echocardiography-based cardiac boundary tracking provides valuable information about the heart condition for interventional procedures and intensive care applications. Nevertheless, echocardiographic images come with several issues, making it a challenging task to develop a tracking and segmentation algorithm that is robust to shadows, occlusions, and heart rate changes. We propose an autonomous tracking method to improve the robustness and efficiency of echocardiographic tracking. A method denoted by hybrid Condensation and adaptive Kalman filter (HCAKF) is proposed to overcome tracking challenges of echocardiograms, such as variable heart rate and sensitivity to the initialization stage. The tracking process is initiated by utilizing active shape model, which provides the tracking methods with a number of tracking features. The procedure tracks the endocardium borders, and it is able to adapt to changes in the cardiac boundaries velocity and visibility. HCAKF enables one to use a much smaller number of samples that is used in Condensation without sacrificing tracking accuracy. Furthermore, despite combining the two methods, our complexity analysis shows that HCAKF can produce results in real-time. The obtained results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method to the changes in the heart rate, yielding an Hausdorff distance of \(1.032\pm 0.375\) while providing adequate efficiency for real-time operations.

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Funding

The funding was provided by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Grant No. 2017–06930).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, M5B 2K3, Canada

    Yasser Ali, Soosan Beheshti & Tohid Yousefi Rezaii

  2. Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, M5B 2K3, Canada

    Farrokh Janabi-Sharifi

  3. Division of Cardiology, St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto, ON, M5B 1W8, Canada

    Asim N. Cheema

  4. Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC), Porto, Portugal

    João Pedrosa

Authors
  1. Yasser Ali
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  2. Soosan Beheshti
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  3. Farrokh Janabi-Sharifi
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  4. Tohid Yousefi Rezaii
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  5. Asim N. Cheema
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  6. João Pedrosa
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Farrokh Janabi-Sharifi.

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Ali, Y., Beheshti, S., Janabi-Sharifi, F. et al. A hybrid approach for tracking borders in echocardiograms. SIViP 17, 453–461 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-022-02250-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-022-02250-y

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