Ultrafast myocardial elastography using coherent compounding of diverging waves during simulated exercise

Objective myocardial deformation assessment during exercise could help the clinician to better diagnose myocardial ischemia. However, the use of conventional focus echocardiography is compromised at increased heart rates due to its limited lateral view field and frame rate. Ultrafast echocardiography using coherent compounding of diverging waves improves temporal resolution while maintaining a large view field (Jonahan, IEEE TMI, 2016) and could be a valuable alternative during exercise. This study aimed to demonstrate that ultrafast echocardiography combined with a Lagrangian speckle model estimator (LSME) can offer high-quality myocardial strain measurements at increased heart rate.