Tracking of Anterior Mitral Leaflets in Echocardiographic Sequences for Detection of Rheumatic Heart Disease

Abstract

Rheumatic Heart Disease is an outcome of Acute-Rheumatic-Fever (ARF). Acute-RheumaticFever is the provoking disease, which slowly damages heart valves. Rheumatic-Heart-Disease (RHD) in cardiac valve effects the mitral valve, which leads to thickened leaflets and that thickened leaflets results in fused tips. Thus, it reduces the mobility of leaflets, which in return reduces heart efficiency. In this thesis, the task is mainly concentrated on Anterior-Mitral-Leaflet (AML) tracking. The tracking is done by first pre-processing and segmenting the input video and then a system is designed to track the motion of those fast moving leaflets to assess heart efficiency. The proposed system does the tracking of AML on the data set (ultrasound mitral valve videos) provided by the Real Hospital Portuguese, in Recife, Brazil. The proposed system tracks a path from the video sequence by using the Mean shift algorithm. The updation of the target changes with the motion of the mitral leaflet and tracks it to assess heart efficiency.