Adaptive attenuation correction in contrast echo

Contrast echocardiography, as a tool for quantitative evaluation of left ventricular myocardial perfusion, has been the subject of massive research in the last few years. Nevertheless, this method is not in wide clinical use. Standard procedures derive the regional blood flow from the time-dependency of the echocardiographic videointensity within the myocardium. Thus, the data acquisition protocol tends to be lengthy (at least 5-6 sec). This is a serious problem, since the imaging plane must not change during the entire data acquisition. The present study presents a novel method, correcting for the signal attenuation in both the tissue and the contrast agent. It enables direct measurement of the local blood volume within the entire myocardium, based on a single heartbeat. Up until now, our technique has been tested on seven different patients, and shows high correlation between the automatically calculated perfusion levels and the segmental contractility.