Realtime Automatic Assessment of Cardiac Function in Echocardiography

Assessment of cardiac function by echocardiography is challenging for nonexperts. In a patient with dyspnea, quantification of the mitral annular excursion (MAE) and velocities is important for the diagnosis of heart failure. The displacement of the atrioventricular (AV) plane is a good indicator of systolic left ventricular function, while the peak velocities give supplementary information about the systolic and diastolic function. By measuring these parameters automatically, a preliminary diagnosis can be given by the nonexpert. We propose an automatic algorithm to localize the mitral annular points in an apical four-chamber view and estimate the MAE, as well as the systolic, early diastolic, and late diastolic tissue peak velocities, by using a deformable ventricle model for orientation and tissue Doppler data for tracking. Automatic parameter estimates from 367 tissue Doppler recordings were compared to reference measurements by experienced cardiologists to assess the accuracy of the estimation, as well as the ability to correctly detect reduced MAE, which we defined as less than 10 mm. The dataset consisted of 200 recordings from a patient population and 167 healthy from a population study. When considering the average of the septal and lateral values, the estimation error for the MAE had a standard deviation of 2.1 mm, which was reduced to 1.9 mm when excluding recordings for which the automatic segmentation failed to locate the AV plane (41 recordings). The corresponding standard deviations for the peak velocities were around 1 cm/s. The classification of MAE was correct in 90% of the cases and had a sensitivity of 83% and a specificity of 92%. We conclude that the algorithm has good accuracy and note that the estimation error for the MAE was comparable to interobserver and methodology agreements reported in the literature.