METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR THE ASSESSMENT AND DISPLAY OF VARIABILITY IN MECHANICAL ACTIVITY OF THE HEART, AND ENHANCEMENT OF ULTRASOUND CONTRAST IMAGING BY VARIABILITY ANALYSIS

摘要

This invention is a method of evaluating the mechanical variability of the heart activity by assessment of the variability of cardiologic echo Doppler images, and of enhancing contrast ultrasound imaging by variability imaging of two-dimensional echo images through the application of finite memory, ECG gated or ungated processing of the acquired images. For cardiac imaging and blood perfusion studies of non-cardiac structures, the acquired images are time-gated by the cardiac cycle to account for cardiac deformation due to contraction, relaxing and filling. To compare blood perfusion characteristics in normal tissue and abnormal tissue, a non-gated version, or gating to another physiologic cycle (e.g. breathing) can be used. The gated scans are either recursive processed in real time or are recorded and processed off-line to get estimation of the mean image and the variability of the image. The resulting images of the mean and variance are displayed for user interpretation.