Cardiac Motion Analysis by Temporal Flow Graphs
This addresses cardiac health assessment for medical imaging, but it is incremental as it builds on existing flow field methods with a new graphical representation.
The paper tackled cardiac motion analysis from B-mode ultrasound by proposing Temporal Flow Graphs (TFG) to depict point movement over time, demonstrating detection of motion irregularities and localization of anatomical landmarks on real and synthetic data.
Cardiac motion analysis from B-mode ultrasound sequence is a key task in assessing the health of the heart. The paper proposes a new methodology for cardiac motion analysis based on the temporal behaviour of points of interest on the myocardium. We define a new signal called the Temporal Flow Graph (TFG) which depicts the movement of a point of interest over time. It is a graphical representation derived from a flow field and describes the temporal evolution of a point. We prove that TFG for an object undergoing periodic motion is also periodic. This principle can be utilized to derive both global and local information from a given sequence. We demonstrate this for detecting motion irregularities at the sequence, as well as regional levels on real and synthetic data. A coarse localisation of anatomical landmarks such as centres of left/right cavities and valve points is also demonstrated using TFGs.