Registration of multiview real-time 3-D echocardiographic sequences

Real-time 3-D echocardiography opens up the possibility of interactive, fast 3-D analysis of cardiac anatomy and function. However, at the present time its quantitative power cannot be fully exploited due to the limited quality of the images. In this paper, we present an algorithm to register apical and parasternal echocardiographic datasets that uses a new similarity measure, based on local orientation and phase differences. By using phase and orientation to guide registration, the effect of artifacts intrinsic to ultrasound images is minimized. The presented method is fully automatic except for initialization. The accuracy of the method was validated qualitatively, resulting in 85% of the cardiac segments estimated having a registration error smaller than 2 mm, and no segments with an error larger than 5 mm. Robustness with respect to landmark initialization was validated quantitatively, with average errors smaller than 0.2 mm and 0.5 degrees for initialization landmarks rotations of up to 15 degrees and translations of up to 10 mm.