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An optimisation-based iterative approach for speckle tracking echocardiography

Authors :
Xujiong Ye
James P. Howard
Benjamin Docking
Joseph D. Howes
Darrel P. Francis
Neda Azarmehr
Massoud Zolgharni
Source :
Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing
Publication Year :
2020
Publisher :
Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2020.

Abstract

Speckle tracking is the most prominent technique used to estimate the regional movement of the heart based on echocardiograms. In this study, we propose an optimised-based block matching algorithm to perform speckle tracking iteratively. The proposed technique was evaluated using a publicly available synthetic echocardiographic dataset with known ground-truth from several major vendors and for healthy/ischaemic cases. The results were compared with the results from the classic (standard) two-dimensional block matching. The proposed method presented an average displacement error of 0.57 pixels, while classic block matching provided an average error of 1.15 pixels. When estimating the segmental/regional longitudinal strain in healthy cases, the proposed method, with an average of 0.32 ± 0.53, outperformed the classic counterpart, with an average of 3.43 ± 2.84. A similar superior performance was observed in ischaemic cases. This method does not require any additional ad hoc filtering process. Therefore, it can potentially help to reduce the variability in the strain measurements caused by various post-processing techniques applied by different implementations of the speckle tracking. Graphical Abstract Standard block matching versus proposed iterative block matching approach.

Details

ISSN :
17410444 and 01400118
Volume :
58
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing
Accession number :
edsair.doi.dedup.....fd7dc88378a4416d54cd1d281ac4eb76
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-020-02142-8