Automated Cardiac Motion Quantification (aCMQ)

To measure the strain, the tissue motion is tracked over a cardiac cycle using a speckle tracking algorithm. Similar to MRI tagging, speckle tracking follows features within the image as they move. Each sub-region of the ROI is divided into blocks, which allows the speckle structure in each block to be tracked. The measured deformation for each sub-region is a weighted combination of the displacements from each of the blocks. The weighting gives greater weight to endocardial blocks than to epicardial blocks. The strain is then calculated from the per-region deformation at the endocardial border. Ultrasound