Automatic recognition of standard views in ultrasound images of the heart

With medical imaging, clinicians are given new opportunities in inspection of anatomical structures, surgical planning and diagnosing. Computer vision is often used with the aim of automating these processes. Ultrasound imaging is one of the most popular medical imaging modalities. The equipment is portable and relatively inexpensive, the procedure is non-invasive and there are few known side effects. But the acquisition of ultrasound images, for instance of the heart, is not a trivial job for the inexperienced. Five classes of standard images, or standard views, have been developed to ensure acceptable quality of ultrasound heart images. Automatic recognition of these standard views, or classification, would be a good starting point for an ”Ultrasound for dummies” project. Recently, a new class of object recognition methods has emerged. These methods are based on matching of local features. Image content is transformed into local feature coordinates, which are ideally invariant to translation, rotation, scaling and other image parameters. In [21], David Lowe proposes the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), which is a method for extracting distinctive invariant features from an image. He also suggests a method for using these features to recognize different images of the same object. In this thesis I suggest using the SIFT features to classify heart view images. The invariance requirements to a standard heart view recognition system are special. Therefore, in addition to using Lowe’s algorithm for feature extraction, a new matching algorithm specialized at the heart view classification task is proposed. With medical imaging, clinicians are given new opportunities in inspection of anatomical structures, surgical planning and diagnosing. Computer vision is often used with the aim of automating these processes. Ultrasound imaging is one of the most popular medical imaging modalities. The equipment is portable and relatively inexpensive, the procedure is non-invasive and there are few known side effects. But the acquisition of ultrasound images, for instance of the heart, is not a trivial job for the inexperienced. Five classes of standard images, or standard views, have been developed to ensure acceptable quality of ultrasound heart images. Automatic recognition of these standard views, or classification, would be a good starting point for an ”Ultrasound for dummies” project. Recently, a new class of object recognition methods has emerged. These methods