Echocardiography image analysis by using vortex metrology

NELLY CAP; ASTRID LORENA VILLAMIZAR AMADO; HÉCTOR RABAL; SILVANA GALLO; MYRIAN TEBALDI

Cancún

Congreso; X Iberoamerican Optics Meeting XIII Latinamerican Meeting on Optics, Lasers and Applications Mexican Optics and Photonics Meeting 2019; 2019

Academia Mexicana de Óptica

Optical image processing techniques allow the generation of an alternative technique for the echocardiography image analysis. We propose the use of phase singularities or optical vortex to offline determination of myocardial deformation parameters such as strain. The strain provides important insights into systolic and diastolic function, myocardial mechanics and many other pathophysiological processes of the heart. As it is well known, the phase singularities serve to identify a set of well-defined geometrical points of the field, corresponding to the locations where the phase is undefined and the amplitude vanishes. These singularities can be identified by their topological and core structure characteristics, serving in this way as a fingerprint of the field. By using Laguerre-Gauss complex transform, it is possible to obtain a complex valued function from intensity echocardiography images. The location of the vortices is done by a minimum mean squared error approximation with planes of the real and imaginary parts of the pseudo-field. The phase singularities are used as image markers, giving the possibility to track the myocardial movement from different echocardiography frames, by matching the core structure properties from each vortex. By using the optical vortex, the local and global strains can be measured. In order to confirm the validity of our proposal a comparison with speckle tracking techniques is shown.