Generation of ultra-realistic synthetic echocardiographic sequences to facilitate standardization of deformation imaging

Despite the overwhelming availability of techniques for computation of cardiac deformation and strain with 2D echocardiography, their widespread dissemination in clinical practice is still held back by the reported low reproducibility between different solutions. This can in part be attributed to the lack of a solid and open quality assurance framework to assess and compare their performance. Building upon our previous work, we present here a new pipeline for the benchmarking of such algorithms making use of realistic 2D synthetic sequences. While the synthetic motion is fully controlled by a computational heart model, the visual appearance is extremely similar to a real ultrasound recording. The pipeline is used to generate an initial library of four sequences.