A comparative study of motion estimation algorithms in cardiac ultrasound sequences

Quantitative analysis and motion estimation of the moving organs, as the heart and lungs, is one of the main objectives pursued in analysis of medical images. In fact, cardiac motion estimation has been widely used with the segmentation to evaluate the cardiac function and a various approaches of motion estimation have been proposed. In this paper, a comparative study of myocardial motion estimation methods, which are applied on ultrasound echographic sequence, is presented.

I. Introduction

The mechanical status of the pathological heart can be assessed from the cardiac motion and strains evaluated in cardiac imaging. Different medical imaging modalities could be considered for cardiac motion estimation like echocardiography and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. Echocardiography is considered as the most widely used method because it is non-invasive and can be performed bedside, in addition to its high temporal resolution.