3D Echocardiogram Reconstruction Employing a Flip Directional Texture Pyramid

Three dimensional(3D)echocardiogram enables cardiologists to visua-lize suspicious cardiac structures in detail.In recent years,this three-dimensional echocardiogram carries important clinical value in virtual surgical simulation.However,this 3D echocardiogram involves a trade-off difficulty between accu-racy and efficient computation in clinical diagnosis.This paper presents a novel Flip Directional 3D Volume Reconstruction(FD-3DVR)method for the recon-struction of echocardiogram images.The proposed method consists of two main steps:multiplanar volumetric imaging and 3D volume reconstruction.In the crea-tion of multiplanar volumetric imaging,two-dimensional(2D)image pixels are mapped into voxels of the volumetric grid.As the obtained slices are discontin-uous,there are some missing voxels in the volume data.To restore the structural and textural information of 3D ultrasound volume,the proposed method creates a volume pyramid in parallel with theflip directional texture pyramid.Initially,the nearest neighbors of missing voxels in the multiplanar volumetric imaging are identified by 3D ANN(Approximate Nearest Neighbor)patch matching method.Furthermore,aflip directional texture pyramid is proposed and aggregated with distance in patch matching tofind out the most similar neighbors.In the recon-struction step,structural and textural information obtained from differentflip angle directions can reconstruct 3D volume well with the desired accuracy.Com-pared with existing 3D reconstruction methods,the proposed Flip Directional 3D Volume Reconstruction(FD-3DVR)method provides superior performance for the mean peak signal-to-noise ratio(40.538 for the proposed method I and 39.626 for the proposed method II).Experimental results performed on the cardi-ac datasets demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method for the reconstruc-tion of echocardiogram images.