Guideline-based learning for standard plane extraction in 3-D echocardiography.

Journal: Journal of medical imaging (Bellingham, Wash.)
Published Date:

Abstract

The extraction of six standard planes in 3-D cardiac ultrasound plays an important role in clinical examination to analyze cardiac function. A guideline-based learning method for efficient and accurate standard plane extraction is proposed. A cardiac ultrasound guideline determines appropriate operation steps for clinical examinations. The idea of guideline-based learning is incorporating machine learning approaches into each stage of the guideline. First, Hough forest with hierarchical search is applied for 3-D feature point detection. Second, initial planes are determined using anatomical regularities according to the guideline. Finally, a regression forest integrated with constraints of plane regularities is applied for refining each plane. The proposed method was evaluated on a 3-D cardiac ultrasound dataset and a synthetic dataset. Compared with other plane extraction methods, it demonstrated an improved accuracy with a significantly faster running time of . Furthermore, it showed the proposed method was robust for a range abnormalities and image qualities, which would be seen in clinical practice.

Authors

  • Peifei Zhu
    Hitachi, Ltd., Research and Development Group, Tokyo, Japan.
  • Zisheng Li
    Hitachi, Ltd., Research and Development Group, Tokyo, Japan.

Keywords

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