Echocardiography is a non-invasive method for monitoring ventricular function and evaluating myocardial hypertrophy in patients with heart disease. Although the information displayed in two-dimensional echocardiograms is generally the most useful for diagnostic purposes, one-dimensional or MMode echocardiography, due to its greater reliability, is widely accepted as the reference method for the evaluation of myocardial wall thickness. We have developed two algorithms for the processing of M-mode echocardiograms and implemented those on a Macintosh II work station. The first allows an automated extraction of myocardial borders. The second performs a restoration of sequences of several consecutive heart beats by performing an average with respect to a normalized time-scale. The essential feature of this technique is to compensate in a fully automated way for variations of the-heart rate.
