Patent ID: 8057394

Claim:
A system for intracardiac imaging, comprising: an ultrasound imaging catheter comprising a phased array ultrasound transducer; an ultrasound beamformer circuit electronically coupled to the ultrasound imaging catheter; a programmable processor coupled to the ultrasound beamformer circuit; and computer readable memory electronically coupled to the programmable processor and having stored therein software instructions which adapt and configure the programmable processor to: store a plurality of ultrasound image frames in memory; store in memory a rotational orientation of the transducer corresponding to each of the plurality of ultrasound image frames; detect edges of tissue structures within each of the plurality of image frames; determine a spatial location of each of the detected edges in each of the plurality of image frames; statistically analyze the spatial locations of the detected edges among a subset of the plurality of image frames with an approximately equal transducer rotational orientation to determine representative spatial locations for the tissue structures imaged from the approximately equal transducer rotational orientation; generate a cartoon rendered image frame of the tissue structures based upon the representative spatial locations imaged from the approximately equal transducer rotational orientation; repeat the steps of statistically analyzing the spatial locations of the detected edges and generating cartoon rendered image frames for each of a plurality of approximately equal transducer rotational orientations to generate a plurality of cartoon rendered image frames; and combine the plurality of cartoon rendered image frames using their corresponding approximately equal transducer rotation orientations to generate a three-dimensional cartoon rendering of tissue structure.