Adaptive image inversion of contrast 3D echocardiography for enabling automated analysis

Introduction: Contrast 3D echocardiography (C3DE) is commonly used to enhance the visual quality of ultrasound images in comparison with non-contrast 3D echocardiography (3DE). Although the image quality in C3DE is perceived to be improved for visual analysis, however it actually deteriorates for the purpose of automatic or semi-automatic analysis due to higher speckle noise and intensity inhomogeneity. Therefore, the LV endocardial feature extraction and segmentation from the C3DE images remains a challenging problem.

Methods: To address this challenge, this work proposes an adaptive pre-processing method to invert the appearance of C3DE image. The image inversion is based on an image intensity threshold value which is automatically estimated through image histogram analysis.

Results: In the inverted appearance, the LV cavity appears dark while the myocardium appears bright thus making it similar in appearance to a 3DE image. Moreover, the resulting inverted image has high contrast and low noise appearance, yielding strong LV endocardium boundary and facilitating feature extraction for segmentation.

Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that the inverse appearance of contrast image enables the subsequent LV segmentation.