ICVS innovation improves assessment of cardiac patients

Allows 3D analysis from 2D echocardiography images, resulting in a more complete diagnosis

A team from the Institute for Research in Life and Health Sciences (ICVS) at the University of Minho created software that allows 3D analysis from 2D echocardiography images, which could prove decisive in evaluating patients in emergency and intensive care. The innovation aggregates five 2D cardiac views in 3D, in a simple and accessible way. Scientists carried out tests with simulated images and now focus on real cases. It is expected that this software can be adopted in clinical practice in hospitals, medical centers and laboratories in general.

The software was announced in the scientific magazine Medical Image Analysis and was authored by Sandro Queirós, João Freitas, João Fonseca and Jorge Correia Pinto, all from the ICVS of the UMinho School of Medicine, in partnership with Jaime Fonseca, from the Centro Algoritmi of the School of Engineering from UMinho, and Claudia Tonelli, from Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre, in Brazil.

The technique, called point-of-care echocardiography (also known as focused cardiac ultrasound, FoCUS) is essential for the rapid assessment of cardiovascular structures and cardiac function at the patient’s bedside, especially in emergency and intensive care settings. Although it offers an immediate assessment, this examination generally uses lower quality equipment and is limited in terms of the number of views acquired, in addition to depending on the experience of the operators, resulting in an essentially qualitative assessment.

Sandro Queirós (left) and João Freitas (right), ICVS / EM

To overcome these limitations and explore the potential of FoCUS for a quantitative, three-dimensional assessment of cardiac function, “our work proposes an innovative approach capable of automatically estimating the relative 3D position between five 2D cardiac views obtained during a FoCUS examination”, explains Sando Queirós, ICVS researcher. This methodology allows all views to be integrated into the same three-dimensional space, thus overcoming the main barrier to the application of 3D analysis techniques in this type of examination.

João Freitas highlights that “the results of our preliminary tests on realistic synthetic data validate the effectiveness of this approach, and the subsequent application of 3D techniques shows a significant improvement compared to two-dimensional geometric methods traditionally used in clinical practice”.