Registration of multi-view apical 3D echocardiography images

Real-time three-dimensional echocardiography (RT3DE) is a non-invasive method to visualize the heart. Disadvantageously, it suffers from non-uniform image quality and a limited field of view. Image quality can be improved by fusion of multiple echocardiography images. Successful registration of the images is essential for prosperous fusion. Therefore, this study examines the performance of different methods for intrasubject registration of multi-view apical RT3DE images. A total of 14 data sets was annotated by two observers who indicated the position of the apex and four points on the mitral valve ring. These annotations were used to evaluate registration. Multi-view end-diastolic (ED) as well as end-systolic (ES) images were rigidly registered in a multi-resolution strategy. The performance of single-frame and multi-frame registration was examined. Multi-frame registration optimizes the metric for several time frames simultaneously. Furthermore, the suitability of mutual information (MI) as similarity measure was compared to normalized cross-correlation (NCC). For initialization of the registration, a transformation that describes the probe movement was obtained by manually registering five representative data sets. It was found that multi-frame registration can improve registration results with respect to single-frame registration. Additionally, NCC outperformed MI as similarity measure. If NCC was optimized in a multi-frame registration strategy including ED and ES time frames, the performance of the automatic method was comparable to that of manual registration. In conclusion, automatic registration of RT3DE images performs as good as manual registration. As registration precedes image fusion, this method can contribute to improved quality of echocardiography images.