25 May Direct estimation of global longitudinal strain from ultrasound using a logarithm-scaled Fourier magnitude correlation
B-mode Speckle Tracking Echocardiography (STE) estimates the change in myocardial tissue length during a heartbeat. Commercial STE software use block-matching to track local speckle patterns and advect hand-drawn boundaries through these tracks to estimate length change. Strain is gaining adoption as a clinical metric for systolic function because it shows better sensitivity and differentiability to ejection fraction. However, vendor-specific STE software shows significant performance differences for quantifying global longitudinal strain (GLS), which we refer to herein as the longitudinal transform correlation or LTC. Additionally, intra- and inter-operator variability and software variation hinders standardization. We developed a novel method for direct GLS estimation from B-mode images. Our framework avoids assumptions of tissue segment shape and deformation common in commercial solutions. Our proposed method relies on a log-transform, Fourier-based cross-correlation. We evaluated the accuracy of our method against conventional STE methods using artificial echocardiogram images. Our results show a 200% improvement in strain measurement accuracy using the novel method. A clinical demonstration was performed using a 54-subject cohort (20 subjects with cardiomyopathy, 34 controls). Our method distinguished between normal and abnormal left ventricular function with an AUC = 0.85, a 10% improvement over conventional GLS algorithms.
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