Current State of Three-Dimensional Myocardial Strain Estimation Using Echocardiography

Abstract

With the developments in ultrasound transducer technology and both hardware and software computing, real-time volumetric imaging has become widely available, accompanied by various methods of assessing three-dimensional (3D) myocardial strain, often referred to as 3D speckle-tracking echocardiographic methods. Indeed, these methods should provide cardiologists with a better view of regional myocardial mechanics, which might be important for diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy. However, currently available 3D speckle-tracking echocardiographic methods are based on different algorithms, which introduce substantial differences between them and make them not interchangeable with each other. Therefore, it is critical that each 3D speckle-tracking echocardiographic method is validated individually before being introduced into clinical practice. In this review, the authors discuss differences and similarities of the currently available 3D strain estimation approaches and provide an overview of the current status of their validation.

The early variation of left ventricular twisting function in patients with lymphoma received anthracycline therapy assessed by three-dimensional speckle tracking echocardiography

“…3D-STE as a novel echocardiographic technique has allowed advances in comprehensive evaluation of cardiac mechanical movement among various clinical scenarios [21][22][23][24]. Furthermore, one of the particular advantages of 3D-STE is the improved accuracy of LV twisting measurements [25,26]. This study showed feasibility and reproducibility of 3D-STE in assessment of early changes in LV twisting function in patients with lymphoma exposed to anthracycline.…”

Feasibility of reproducible vendor independent estimation of cardiac function based on first generation speckle tracking echocardiography

“…STE is based on tracking speckle patterns in conventional B-mode images, which is now feasible using readily available computational resources. Yet, in spite of its popularity, attested by thousands of clinical echocardiographic studies [8][9][10][11][12][13] over the last 10 years, translating STE into the daily clinical routine is far more challenging in both the single and multi-vendor clinical environments. Thus, though the Strain Standardization Initiative reduced significantly the inter-vendor variability of the strain measurements, a consequent study [14] concludes that current vendor independent STE software do and the sam Speckle tracking is mostly performed by block-matching [19][20][21][22] , where the displacement of a material point is estimated by searching for the "best match" between a block in the source frame and a block in the target frame.…”

Robust boundary detection of left ventricles on ultrasound images using ASM-level set method

“…The segmentation of left ventricular (LV) boundaries on echocardiography images is especially difficult. Echocardiography is one of the major imaging techniques to measure the heart functions [6]. The detection of the cardiac boundaries, especially left ventricular (LV) boundaries on echocardiography images, is crucial for the quantitative cardiac functional assessment.…”