A novel drift compensation algorithm for improved beat-to-beat repeatability of myocardial strain imaging: Preliminary in vivo results

Myocardial strain imaging has been shown to add significant prognostic and diagnostic value to echocardiography. While the reliability of ultrasound-based strain measurement techniques has improved considerably in terms of regional consistency and inter-reader, inter-vendor agreement; most state-of-the-art strain imaging packages constrain their analyses to individual cardiac cycles. This limitation is largely attributed to drift in displacement estimation over multiple consecutive cardiac cycles which results in unstable strain measurements. We present here a novel displacement-based drift compensation technique to correct for beat-to-beat drift and yield repeatable measures of regional myocardial strain over consecutive heart beats. A preliminary performance evaluation of this method in vivo demonstrated substantial improvements in maintaining temporal stability of displacement tracking across multiple heart beats and consistent measurements of end-systolic strain for prolonged acquisitions.