4D reconstruction of the left ventricle during a single heart beat from ultrasound imaging

A new acquisition system using a continuously rotating 2D ultrasound probe is proposed to reconstruct the movement and deformation of the left cardiac ventricle (LV). During only one cardiac cycle, the system acquires successive conic sections of the LV. Then, after the LV contour detection on each image, which may be performed manually or using an active modelling technique, the set of sparse spatio-temporal data is used to build a harmonic LV model. The proposed reconstruction technique is based on mild assumptions about the spatial and temporal frequency characteristics of the LV considered as a periodic four-dimensional signal. The reconstruction results are clinically promising. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.