Fast myocardial motion and strain estimation in 3D cardiac ultrasound with Sparse Demons

This article presents a new method for motion and strain estimation in 3D echocardiography, called Sparse Demons, along with quantitative and qualitative evaluations from a dataset of synthetic ultrasound sequences. Motion estimation is based on a fast demons-like algorithm focusing on myocardial tissue. Synthetic 3D ultrasound images were generated by combining a biomechanical model of the heart with a realistic ultrasound imaging model. Ischemic areas were defined in the mechanical model to investigate whether our algorithm can discriminate healthy from diseased segments.