Speckle Tracking in 3D Echocardiography with Motion Coherence

Tracking of speckles in echocardiography enables the study of myocardium deformation, and thus can provide insights about heart structure and function. Most of the current methods are based on 2D speckle tracking, which suffers from errors due to through-plane decorrelation. Speckle tracking in 3D overcomes such limitation. However, 3D speckle tracking is a challenging problem due to relatively low spatial and temporal resolution of 3D echocardiography. To ensure accurate and robust tracking, high level spatial and temporal constraints need to be incorporated. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for speckle tracking in 3D echocardiography. Instead of tracking each speckle independently, we enforce a motion coherence constraint, in conjunction with a dynamic model for the speckles. This method is validated on in vivo porcine hearts, and is proved to be accurate and robust.