Echocardiography is part of the standard of care for the visualization of the heart anatomy in the hospital setting. Although the use of 2D echocardiography is still widespread clinically, 3D/4D echocardiography is the method of choice to assess the movement and function of the heart valves, facilitating the manipulation and interpretation of the patient’s heart anatomy. Commercial cardiovascular ultrasound systems, which use a technique called direct volume rendering, have a certain number of parameters that allow clinical users to optimize the realtime visualization of the anatomical components of interest, such as the heart valves. Despite the relevance of commercial platforms in the clinical setting, to our knowledge, there is currently no work that supports the methods that are currently used. In addition, there are still some limitations in terms of parameter adjustment, which make it difficult to optimize valve visualization without encountering an occlusion problem caused by superfluous contextual information. The challenge is to retain as much contextual information as possible, allowing clinical users to properly situate themselves within the patient's anatomy, while having the best possible visualization of the valve, which is usually the anatomical component of primary interest.
With the aim of proposing a solution to this occlusion problem, a new method for viewing 3D/4D echocardiograms has been developed based on “focus + context” (F+C), a visualization technique which aims to present a detailed region of interest along with an overview of the surrounding context in lesser detail. This new method for viewing echocardiograms is intended to allow the clinical user to modify parameter values differently within a certain spherical region of interest, allowing to independently adjust the parameters for the valve and those of the context. The new visualization method was validated in a user study conducted with clinical experts in Philadelphia at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) as well as in Montreal at the Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM) and CHU SainteJustine. As part of this study, clinical experts optimized visualization parameters for a series of echocardiograms with the method traditionally used by commercial platforms, then with the proposed method with F+C. Following the user study, the relevance of a F+C-based method in the context of echocardiogram visualization has been demonstrated. More specifically, the user study results showed a difference in parameter adjustment by clinical experts in the contextual anatomy region when using the F+C-based method.
| Date | 21 Apr 2023 |
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| Original language | French |
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| Awarding Institution | - École de technologie supérieure
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| Supervisor | Simon Drouin (Supervisor) |
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St-Onge, S. (Author),
Drouin (Supervisor),
21 Apr 2023Student thesis: Master's thesis › Master in Engineering: Engineering