3-D Display of the Wall Motion for Regional Cardiac Muscle from Ultrasonic B-mode Image

Abstract

We have developed extracting the inner and outer walls of the cardiac muscle from a set of ultrasonic B-mode images. In this paper, we propose a new 3-D (radius, angle and time) display method of the motion function on the inner wall to evaluate the motion of the myocardium objectively. Its method displays the time transition of a cardiac wall during one cardiac cycle, and it is colored the thickness or the thickening rate of the myocardium on the surface of the 3-D object. The inner and outer walls of the heart are extracted from a set of ultrasonic B-mode Images. We implemented 3-D display system using C language and DirectX 3D in MS-Windows. We calculate the position of the points for 3-D display from the contour lines of the cardiac muscle by the cubic spline curve. The curve connects smoothly between one point and the other one point. And we found the thickness and thickening rate by using the contour lines of the cardiac muscle. We define the thickness by the shortest distance between the outer wall and the inner wall, and we calculate the thickness rate from the obtained thickness. We add the rotation view of the 3-D object to see the every side of myocardium. We confirmed the usefulness of our 3-D display.