超音波心臓断層像の射影演算子を用いた辺縁検出

抄録

Left ventricular thickness, diameter and their time variance play importantt role in an assessment of a cardiac function using echocardiography. In order to measure left ventricular wall thickness and diameter from echocardiogram, it is required to detect a border which is a boundary between cardiac muscle and blood. The method of border detection requires reproducibility, high accuracy and high-speed. Many of methods of border detection have been proposed before now. However, they require much calculation.
In this paper, we propose the high-speed detection method using projection operators. The method is composed of two steps. Firstly, we extract candidate points for the border under the assumption that points on the border take almost extremes of gradients of an image. Then, we estimate the border curve using two kinds of projection operators under assumption that the border is a smooth and continuous curve. This method realizes about 10 times high-speed compared with a conventional method.