Quantitative 4D Echocardiography using Fusion Techniques and Spatio-temporal Analysis
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Engineering Science
Abstract
4D echocardiography (or real-time 3D echocardiography) is a recent addition to the volumetric cardiac imaging field which is receiving significant clinical interest as it may replace the need for more expensive techniques (MRI) and also suggest new areas of application for volumetric cardiac imaging e.g. in interventions. This research project, building on the succces of EPSRC GR/S72801, concerns quantitative 4D echocardiography, and in particular developing quantitative methods for estimating global and regional functional measures of the health of the heart from 4D echocardiography The novelty in the project is built on two principal ideas.1. Fused 4D echocardiography: an idea, initially investigated in EPSRC GR/S72801, of fusing information from 2 or more 4D acquisitions to get an anatomically more complete representation of the structure/function of a heart than can be obtained from a single acquisition. In prior work we developed methodology for fusion and showed it led to superior 3D images. In this new project we plan to investigate automated quantitative analysis (segmentation) which we hypothese will be superior on fused 4D echocardiography. We will also investigate techniques for combined alignment (registration) and segmentation which is a natural next step to investigate towards making quantitative fused 4D echocardiography fully automated and hence useful in clinical practice. 2. Analysis of combined rest and stress echocardiographic sequences: Stress echocardiography is a widely used test in clinical practice where imaging is done when the heart is at rest and then after it has been stressed. The limited work on quantitative image analysis of stress echocardiography has treated rest and stress sequences separately even though it is the relative difference between the two that is used in clinical diagnosis. The novel idea in this part of the project is to use both pre and post stress sequences to define a model of healthy/abnormal function (mathematically a Hidden Markov Model) which is learned from training sequences. We do this on volumetric data. In the project we will build such models and apply them to initially classify disease and then as a constraint in segmentation.Both developments will advance clinical 4D echocardiography, and 3D cardiac imaging more generally. The developed tools may also find application in non-cardiac applications, such as in obstetrics and gynaecology (assessing the health of the uterus), or oncology (tumour response to treatment).
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
Alison Noble (Principal Investigator) | |
Harald Becher (Co-Investigator) |
Publications
Augustine D
(2015)
"3D fusion" echocardiography improves 3D left ventricular assessment: comparison with 2D contrast echocardiography.
in Echocardiography (Mount Kisco, N.Y.)
Coffey S
(2017)
Protocol and quality assurance for carotid imaging in 100,000 participants of UK Biobank: development and assessment.
in European journal of preventive cardiology
Greenhalgh T
(2017)
Maximising value from a United Kingdom Biomedical Research Centre: study protocol.
in Health research policy and systems
Rueda S
(2014)
Evaluation and Comparison of Current Fetal Ultrasound Image Segmentation Methods for Biometric Measurements: A Grand Challenge
in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Noble JA
(2011)
Ultrasonic image analysis and image-guided interventions.
in Interface focus
Augustine D
(2012)
CMR right ventricular strain assessment using feature tracking cine images: agreement with echocardiography
in Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance
Augustine D
(2013)
Global and regional left ventricular myocardial deformation measures by magnetic resonance feature tracking in healthy volunteers: comparison with tagging and relevance of gender.
in Journal of cardiovascular magnetic resonance : official journal of the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance
Boardman H
(2017)
Aortic stiffness and blood pressure variability in young people: a multimodality investigation of central and peripheral vasculature.
in Journal of hypertension
Stebbing RV
(2015)
Data-driven shape parameterization for segmentation of the right ventricle from 3D+t echocardiography.
in Medical image analysis
Rajpoot K
(2011)
The evaluation of single-view and multi-view fusion 3D echocardiography using image-driven segmentation and tracking.
in Medical image analysis
Description | This project has advanced technical aspects of the 4D fusion echocardiography approach and demonstrated that it has similar diagnostic quality as 2D contrast echocardiography which is the gold standard for stress echocardiography (see publications). This is significant in suggesting that 4D fusion echocardiography may be a viable alternative to using contrast agent imaging in a stress clinic although further clinical evaluation is needed to verify this hypothesis. Technical advances have also been made to demonstrate how machine-learning can be used for plane-finding and segmentation (delineation of boundaries) and quantification in 4D echocardiography. Results have been published in peer-reviewed engineering and clinical journals. |
Exploitation Route | Earlier work has been licenced to a university spin-out Intelligent Ultrasound. The focus of this work was left ventricular analysis but the analysis has been extended to right ventricle analysis which is a harder geometry to analyse. Some of the results have been translated to the fetal ultrasound domain where our own 3D ultrasound research is now focussed. At the time of this work we were one of 2 or 3 groups worldwide looking at 3D ultrasound image analysis. This number has now grown as analysis of ultrasound images matures as a topic. |
Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Healthcare |
Description | Licensing of technology to a university spin-out. Licensing of software to a university spin-out. Beneficiaries: SME Contribution Method: Developed and evaluated clinically the solution with report of findings in academic engineering and clinical journals. |
First Year Of Impact | 2012 |
Sector | Healthcare |
Impact Types | Societal Economic |
Description | CDT Annual Student Conference (KCL) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Invited by students to give talk on my career and research. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
Description | Microsoft Postgraduate Summer School |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Invited talk at Microsoft Summer school |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | OxFest (Oxford) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Careers talk as part of OxFest which included presentation of outputs of this research. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | Placenta workshop (New Delhi, India) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
Results and Impact | The international workshop explored the state-of-art understanding in placental biology through to clinical management of conditions related to abnormal placental function with a focus on understanding implications to the Indian population. International leaders in the field were invited to attend. There was interest in better understanding the state-of-art in placental and fetal imaging and image analysis and I gave a talk on this topic. A number of directions of follow-on were discussed as follow-on. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
Description | Samsung Satellitte Symposium, European Congress in Radiology |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Talk was part of a lunch symposium presenting latest research in AI applied to radiology |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | School Visit (Oxford) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | Talk to year 9-12 Biomedical Sciences Society on biomedical engineering which including presenting work from this grant. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | School talk |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | Talk at Headington School as the Key Note speaker for their Year of Science. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Speaker - International Women in Engineering Day 2017 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | Secondary school girls from a number of local schools visited the department to see different areas of engineering and do some simple activities related to engineering. I gave the short talk at tea on some of emerging areas of engineering (wacky engineering) and talked a little about my own research and my field. Feedback from schools was positive for the whole event. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | University of Bath Annual Athena Swan Lecture |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Careers talk which included presentation of work from the research grant. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |