Automatic rejection of echocardiographic motion artifacts

Signal averaging of ECG triggered 2-D echocardiographic frames acquired over multiple cardiac cycles has been used to improve the low signal-to-noise ratio inherent in echocardiography. Averaging of N images of a stationary scene increases the signal-to-noise amplitude ratio by √N. Motion from respiration, transducer movement, patient movement and irregular cardiac contraction violates the stationary scene assumption and therefore degrades the quality of the resultant averaged image. Online digital acquisition of the echocardiographic images allows digital subtraction techniques to be used for motion detection. Rejection of frames exhibiting significant motion improves the quality of the resultant averaged frame. An all digital prototype auto-rejection system has been developed to automatically identify frames with motion artifact, and to reject those frames prior to the averaging process, replacing the subjective, time intensive procedure of manual review