A setup for ultrasound based assessment of the aortic root geometry

Planning aortic valve reconstruction requires amodel of the aortic root geometry. One image modalityavailable in the clinicis transesophageal ultrasound. Wepresent a setup to obtain ultrasound images of porcinevalves in different states, i.e., mimicking the dilatation andreconstruction of the aortic root. We studied whether keygeometry parameters can be obtained from the ultrasoundimages. Our preliminary results indicate that the location ofthe commissures, the diameter of the annulus and the coap-tation height can be estimated from the images and the setupcan help validate the fitting of the prosthesis.