Automatic apical view classification of echocardiograms using a discriminative learning dictionary.

As part of striving towards fully automatic cardiac functional assessment of echocardiograms, automatic classification of their standard views is essential as a pre-processing stage. The similarity among three of the routinely acquired longitudinal scans: apical two-chamber (A2C), apical four-chamber (A4C) and apical long-axis (ALX), and the noise commonly inherent to these scans - make the classification a challenge. Here we introduce a multi-stage classification algorithm that employs spatio-temporal feature extraction (Cuboid Detector) and supervised dictionary learning (LC-KSVD) approaches to uniquely enhance the automatic recognition and classification accuracy of echocardiograms.