Intensity-invariant 2D+T acoustic boundary detection

Abstract

The authors address the problem of spatio-temporal acoustic boundary detection in echocardiography. They propose a phase-based feature detection method to be used as the front end to higher-level 2D+T/3D+T reconstruction algorithms. They develop a 2D+T version of this algorithm and illustrate its performance on some typical echocardiogram sequences. They show how their temporal-based algorithm helps to reduce the number of spurious feature responses due to speckle. Further, the authors' approach is intensity-amplitude invariant. This makes it particularly attractive for echocardiographic segmentation, where choosing a single global intensity-based edge threshold is problematic.