A proposed two-pass 3-D speckle tracking method reduced computational cost by a factor of 10 compared with conventional exhaustive search and outperformed one-pass tracking by a factor of 3 in RMSE.
Does an efficient two-pass 3-D speckle tracking method improve computational cost and accuracy compared to conventional exhaustive search in cardiac ultrasound imaging?
A novel two-pass 3-D speckle tracking method significantly reduces computational cost and improves accuracy for cardiac ultrasound elasticity imaging.
Speckle tracking based on block matching is the most common method for multi-dimensional motion estimation in ultrasound elasticity imaging. Extension of 2-D methods to 3-D has been problematic because of the large computational load of 3-D tracking, as well as performance issues related to the low frame (volume) rates of 3-D images. To address both of these problems, we have developed an efficient two-pass tracking method suited to cardiac elasticity imaging. PatchMatch, originally developed for image editing, has been adapted for ultrasound to provide first-pass displacement estimates. Second-pass estimation uses conventional block matching within a much smaller search region. 3-D displacements are then obtained using correlation filtering previously shown to be effective against speckle decorrelation. Both simulated and in vivo canine cardiac results demonstrate that the proposed two-pass method reduces computational cost compared with conventional 3-D exhaustive search by a factor of 10. Moreover, it outperforms onepass tracking by a factor of about 3 in terms of root-mean-square error relative to available ground-truth displacements.
Jeng et al. (Mon,) conducted a other in Cardiac elasticity imaging. Two-pass 3-D speckle tracking method vs. Conventional 3-D exhaustive search and one-pass tracking was evaluated on Computational cost and root-mean-square error. A proposed two-pass 3-D speckle tracking method reduced computational cost by a factor of 10 compared with conventional exhaustive search and outperformed one-pass tracking by a factor of 3 in RMSE.