The Medical Awareness Institute

A Global  Non-Profit Healthcare Research Organization

A Nonprofit 501c3 California Corporation

Staff@MAIcares.org 

619-280-2100

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The Medical Awareness Institute in conjunction with Dr. Jensen and Micro USA are addressing abnormalities associated with Cardiovascular sonograms.

Current technology fails to accurately determine the correct refraction and ejection rate of the heart. It is completely arbitrary as to how the technologist will report his or her findings. We have personally experienced differences of up to 12% amongst technicians. A critical number for heart patients is 35%. Having a 12% spread may prevent the patient from having a heart transplant to save his or her life or recommending rehabilitation to improve the heart function.

Through research and awareness campaigns MAI's prudent planning efforts now will insure long term health benefits for the future.

Problem

Echocardiogram by itself does not enable a cardiologist to diagnose and assess the cardiovascular health of a patient. One reason for this is that the echocardiogram images are noisy, small in size and have low resolution. Another reason for not being able to interpret the image is that echocardiogram also lacks contrast. Due to low contrast, regions are not clearly delineated and therefore it is very difficult even for an experienced cardiologist to diagnose accurately. Due to these problems the current technology fails to accurately determine the refraction and ejection fraction of the heart. Some have personal experience to indicate that the readings in ejection fraction are off by 12%, which is very significant. A lower value for the ejection fraction among heart patients is 35%. A 12% difference in reading may jeopardize human lives. 

Simple image processing procedures such as contrast stretching and histogram equalization are not sufficient to render an echocardiogram useful for further analysis. A more advanced digital image processing is necessary to render the images useful for diagnostic purposes. A difficult task is to segment an echocardiogram into homogeneous regions for the purpose of classification. Figure 1 is one such example where the left image is the original and the image on the right side is the segmented image. The segmented regions are superimposed on the actual image for better visualization. As can be seen from the figure, this segmentation can be improved significantly to effect automatic identification and classification with much better accuracy. Though the field of digital image processing is well matured, its application to echocardiography still needs to advance. Moreover, 3D rendering of a human live heart will be very useful not only for diagnosis but also for procedures such as ablation.

The Medical Awareness Institute welcomes Dr. James C. Jensen as its new President.