Shape based similarity of continuous wave doppler images

Continuous wave Doppler images in a data base comprising cardiac echo studies are processed to separate Doppler frames. The frames are pre-processed to extract envelope curves and their corner shape features. Shape patterns in Doppler images from echo studies of patients with known cardiac (valvular) diseases are employed to infer the similarity in valvular disease labels for purposes of automated clinical decision support. Specifically, similarity in appearance of Doppler images from the same disease class is modeled as a constrained non-rigid translation transform of velocity envelopes embedded in these images. Shape similarity between two Doppler images is then judged by recovering the alignment transform using a variant of dynamic shape warping. Since different diseases appear as characteristic shape patterns in Doppler images, measuring the similarity in the shape pattern conveyed within the velocity region of two Doppler images can infer the similarity in their diagnosis labels.