A study on the 3D position estimation of ventricular borders extracted from 2D echocardiography data

We study on the reconstruction of 3D left ventricle(LV) using only 2D echocardiography data and information on apical long-axis views. Especially, this paper focuses on determining the 3D position of LV contours extracted from 2D echocardiography images. First we mathematically model the relationship between LV contours on the apical views and their corresponding 3D positions. The relationship is expressed as a linear equation in which the right-hand side is the measured data consisting of all the LV contour points on each view and the coefficient matrix is an unknown matrix that transforms the unknown 3D positions into contour points on their related apical view, with distance and orthogonality conditions on the coefficient matrix and the 3D positions. Next we consider a non-convex constrained minimization problem to determine the coefficient matrix and the 3D positions. To solve this minimization problem, we adopt two block coordinate descent method with a solver in OPTI for quadratically constrained quadratic program. For validating the proposed method, some numerical experiments are performed with synthetic data. The experimental results show that the proposed model is promising and available for real echocardiography data. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.