3D Echocardiogram Reconstruction Employing a Flip Directional Texture Pyramid

Abstract

Three dimensional (3D) echocardiogram enables cardiologists to visualize suspicious cardiac structures in detail. In recent years, this three-dimensional echocardiogram carries important clinical value in virtual surgical simulation. However, this 3D echocardiogram involves a trade-off difficulty between accuracy and efficient computation in clinical diagnosis. This paper presents a novel Flip Directional 3D Volume Reconstruction (FD-3DVR) method for the reconstruction of echocardiogram images. The proposed method consists of two main steps: multiplanar volumetric imaging and 3D volume reconstruction. In the creation of multiplanar volumetric imaging, two-dimensional (2D) image pixels are mapped into voxels of the volumetric grid. As the obtained slices are discontinuous, there are some missing voxels in the volume data. To restore the structural and textural information of 3D ultrasound volume, the proposed method creates a volume pyramid in parallel with the flip directional texture pyramid. Initially, the nearest neighbors of missing voxels in the multiplanar volumetric imaging are identified by 3D ANN (Approximate Nearest Neighbor) patch matching method. Furthermore, a flip directional texture pyramid is proposed and aggregated with distance in patch matching to find out the most similar neighbors. In the reconstruction step, structural and textural information obtained from different flip angle directions can reconstruct 3D volume well with the desired accuracy. Compared with existing 3D reconstruction methods, the proposed Flip Directional 3D Volume Reconstruction (FD-3DVR) method provides superior performance for the mean peak signal-to-noise ratio (40.538 for the proposed method I and 39.626 for the proposed method II). Experimental results performed on the cardiac datasets demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method for the reconstruction of echocardiogram images.