Contrast agents are now widely used in stress echocardiography (SE) to improve visualization of the endocardial border, improve confidence in wall motion assessment, and reduce the number of uninterpretable images. The use of contrast agents in SE has also been shown to improve accuracy of wall motion assessment for the detection of coronary artery disease (CAD) compared with unenhanced SE imag...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES We assessed the ability of portable echocardiography (with contrasts) to clearly delineate the cardiac structure, and evaluated the impact of its use on the diagnosis and management of critically ill patients in Korea. SUBJECTS AND METHODS We prospectively enrolled 123 patients (mean age 66±16 years), who underwent portable transthoracic echocardiography (with contra...

Precise non-invasive localisation of the site of a small ventricular septal defect was attempted using a new technique that simultaneously combines conventional cross sectional echocardiography with a Doppler system by superimposing the colour coded direction and velocity of blood flow directly on to real time ultrasound images. Twenty three patients with unoperated ventricular septal defects a...

BACKGROUND Strain analysis is feasible using three-dimensional (3D) echocardiography. This approach provides various parameters based on speckle tracking analysis from one full-volume image of the left ventricle; however, evidence for its volume independence is still lacking. METHODS Fifty-eight subjects who were examined by transthoracic echocardiography immediately before and after hemodial...

BACKGROUND Point-of-care (POC) echocardiography may be helpful for mass triage, but such a strategy requires adequately trained sonographers at the remote site. The aim of this study was to test the feasibility of using a novel POC echocardiography training program for improving physicians' imaging skills during preanesthetic cardiac evaluations performed in a community camp organized for treat...

Coplanarity is a relationship of a set of points that exist on a single plane. Coplanarities can be easily observed in a scene with planer surfaces, and these types of coplanarities have been widely used for 3D reconstructions based on geometrical constraints. Other types of coplanarities that can be observed from images are those observed as cross sections of planes and scenes; for example, po...

This paper proposes an efficient technique for human motion recognition based on motion history images and an eigenspace technique. In recent years, human motion recognition has become one of the most popular research fields. It is expected to be applied in a security system, man-machine communication, and so on. In the proposed technique, we use two feature images and the eigenspace technique ...

Ultrasound images are characterized by their special speckle appearance, low contrast, and low signalto-noise ratio. It is always challenging to extract important clinical information from these images. An important step before formal analysis is to transform the image to significant features of interest. Intensity based methods do not perform particularly well on ultrasound images. However, it...

Segmentation is an important task in all kinds of image analysis. In medical image analysis segmentation has a great clinical value since the aim could be to localize organs or pathologies in order to raise the quality of diagnoses. This thesis consists of three papers where different segmentation techniques have been applied to different imaging modalities. In the first paper a full computer a...