A simulation pipeline generated an open-access library of 105 realistic vendor-specific synthetic 2-D echocardiography sequences to benchmark speckle tracking algorithms.
The creation of an open-access library of realistic, vendor-specific synthetic 2-D echocardiography sequences provides a standardized quality assurance pipeline for benchmarking speckle tracking algorithms.
Two-dimensional (2-D) echocardiography is the modality of choice in the clinic for the diagnosis of cardiac disease. Hereto, speckle tracking (ST) packages complement visual assessment by the cardiologist by providing quantitative diagnostic markers of global and regional cardiac function (e.g., displacement, strain, and strain-rate). Yet, the reported high vendor-dependence between the outputs of different ST packages raises clinical concern and hampers the widespread dissemination of the ST technology. In part, this is due to the lack of a solid commonly accepted quality assurance pipeline for ST packages. Recently, we have developed a framework to benchmark ST algorithms for 3-D echocardiography by using realistic simulated volumetric echocardiographic recordings. Yet, 3-D echocardiography remains an emerging technology, whereas the compelling clinical concern is, so far, directed to the standardization of 2-D ST only. Therefore, by building upon our previous work, we present in this paper a pipeline to generate realistic synthetic sequences for 2-D ST algorithms. Hereto, the synthetic cardiac motion is obtained from a complex electromechanical heart model, whereas realistic vendor-specific texture is obtained by sampling a real clinical ultrasound recording. By modifying the parameters in our pipeline, we generated an open-access library of 105 synthetic sequences encompassing: 1) healthy and ischemic motion patterns; 2) the most common apical probe orientations; and 3) vendor-specific image quality from seven different systems. Ground truth deformation is also provided to allow performance analysis. The application of the provided data set is also demonstrated in the benchmarking of a recent academic ST algorithm.
Alessandrini et al. (Fri,) conducted a other in Cardiac disease (n=105). Simulation pipeline for 2-D speckle tracking synthetic sequences was evaluated on Generation of synthetic sequences with ground truth deformation. A simulation pipeline generated an open-access library of 105 realistic vendor-specific synthetic 2-D echocardiography sequences to benchmark speckle tracking algorithms.