Three Dimensional Echocardiography: Recent Trends in Segmen tation Methods

Background: Echocardiography is a rapidly developing area of research in medical imaging. It is also called an echo test or heart ultrasound which captures moving picture of the heart using sound waves and is a potential alternative to other imaging modalities as far as the advantage is concerned. Discussion: The new generation echocardiography scanners have the ability to acquire dense image volumes either real time or with few heartbeats. At present, three dimensional echocardiography complements the routine two dimensional echocardiography in clinical practice by providing useful clinical information that has led to recommend its use in defining the left ventricle chamber volume in order to diagnose the various heart disorders. Segmentation of chamber is thus a challenging task, as the ultrasound data consist of speckle noise (acoustic interference) and artefacts which have to be removed. Conclusion: This paper summarizes the literature on recent research on 3D echocardiography image segmentation methods, focusing on techniques developed for medical diagnostic.