Quantitative evaluation of correlation-based 3D vs. 2D speckle tracking using finite element cardiac mechanical model and in-vitro phantom

Two-dimensional (2D) speckle tracking (ST) has been used extensively over the years in many different ultrasound (US) elasticity imaging applications with some limitations. 2D ST is limited especially for cardiac applications because of the 3D and complex motion of the heart. Out-of-plane motion is a major source of decorrelation for 2D ST. Recently 3D ST based on full 3D kernel search has been developed to overcome these limitations. In this study, the improvement of 3D ST performance compared to 2D ST is quantitatively analyzed via both a finite element (FE) based cardiac mechanical model and water tank experiments using a tissue phantom. Finite element based analysis suggested an improvement of about two folds in the errors. Considerable improvement in the quality of the displacement estimate images was observed in the experiments.