Simulation of realistic echocardiographic sequences for ground-truth validation of motion estimation

We present a framework for the simulation of realistic cardiac ultrasound sequences. Both the visual aspect and the synthesized motion mimic a real echocardiography sequence used as template. The resulting simulation appears virtually indistinguishable from a real scan. As the true tissue motion is known, these synthetic sequences can provide a trustful benchmark for the analysis of heart motion. This possibility is illustrated by comparing the performance of two well known motion estimation algorithms.