Consistent reconstruction of 4D fetal heart ultrasound images to cope with fetal motion

Purpose 4D ultrasound imaging of the fetal heart relies on reconstructions from B-mode images. In the presence of fetal motion, current approaches suffer from artifacts, which are unrecoverable for single sweeps. Methods We propose to use many sweeps and exploit the resulting redundancy to automatically recover from motion by reconstructing a 4D image which is consistent in phase, space, and time. An interactive visualization framework to view animated ultrasound slices from 4D reconstructions on arbitrary planes was developed using a magnetically tracked mock probe. Results We first quantified the performance of 10 4D reconstruction formulations on simulated data. Reconstructions of 14 in vivo sequences by a baseline, the current state-of-theart, and the proposed approach were then visually ranked with respect to temporal quality on orthogonal views. Rankings from 5 observers showed that the proposed 4D reconstruction approach significantly improves temporal image quality in comparison with the baseline. The 4D reconstructions of the baseline and the proposed methods were then inspected interactively for accessibility to clinically important views and rated for their clinical usefulness by an ultrasound specialist in obstetrics and gynecology. The reconstructions by the proposed method were rated as 'very useful' in 71% and were statistically significantly more useful than the baseline reconstructions. Conclusions Multi-sweep fetal heart ultrasound acquisitions in combinationwith consistent 4D image reconstruction improves quality as well as clinical usefulness of the resulting 4D images in the presence of fetal motion.