Optical flow computation in 2-D echocardiography

A method based on the computation of the optical flow, or instantaneous velocity field, on sequences of two-dimensional (2-D) echocardiograms to quantify ventricular wall motion is presented. The method utilizes couples of consecutive frames to compute, for each pixel, the 2-D apparent velocity vector which characterizes the interframe motion. By scaling the velocity amplitudes with gray-level values, velocity images can be generated from each couple of frames in the sequence. Horizontal and vertical velocity component images are generated frame by frame during the cardiac cycle. Referring the velocity vectors to a intraventricular central point, radial and tangential velocity component images are also generated.