Digital averaging to facilitate two‐dimensional echocardiographic measurements

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Abstract
A problem in quantitative two-dimensional echocardiography is myocardial dropout of still frame images. This study was designed to evaluate the ability of digital averaging to overcome myocardial dropout without distorting quantitative measurements. Forty-one percent of 80 digitally averaged images were thought to be improved by five independent observers, whereas 78 showed some deterioration. Measurements obtained from processed images were statistically identical (r ≥ 0.9) to those from three arithmetically averaged, unprocessed images in 60 patients. Digital averaging can improve image quality without measurement distortion and should facilitate two-dimensional echocardiographic quantitation.