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.

中文翻译：

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一种基于优化的斑点跟踪超声心动图迭代方法。


斑点跟踪是用于根据超声心动图估计心脏区域运动的最重要的技术。在本研究中，我们提出了一种基于优化的块匹配算法来迭代执行散斑跟踪。使用公开的合成超声心动图数据集对所提出的技术进行了评估，该数据集具有来自几个主要供应商的已知事实真相以及针对健康/缺血病例的情况。将结果与经典（标准）二维块匹配的结果进行比较。该方法的平均位移误差为 0.57 像素，而经典块匹配的平均误差为 1.15 像素。当估计健康病例的节段/区域纵向应变时，所提出的方法的平均值为 0.32 ± 0.53，优于经典方法的平均值 3.43 ± 2.84。在缺血病例中也观察到了类似的优越性能。此方法不需要任何额外的临时过滤过程。因此，它可能有助于减少由散斑跟踪的不同实现所应用的各种后处理技术引起的应变测量的可变性。图解摘要 标准块匹配与建议的迭代块匹配方法。