Complete 3D anisotropy measurement with coherence imaging

Estimating the full 3D coherence of the cardiac structure using ultrasound imaging is a current challenge in cardiac coherence imaging. It would greatly help practitioners in clinics for the quick diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction. This paper proposes a complete 3D anisotropy measurement for coherence imaging based on a geometrical approach to address this challenge. Several in vitro experiments are made with a coherence phantom composed of nylon threads modelling a muscle sheetlet. To evaluate the accuracy of the proposed method, the phantom is manually rotated in an in-plane and out-of-plane manner for different angles. The sheetlet's orientation is estimated using the proposed approach and compared to the ground truth. It is shown experimentally that the proposed method is sensitive to out-of-plane coherence. The estimates are accurate for both in-plane and out-of-plane with respect to the uncertainty in the measurements.