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Mysterious spots inside the heart: How can we track them with ultrasound?
In the fields of cardiology and medical imaging, speckle tracking echocardiography (STE) is a specialized imaging technology that analyzes the movement of heart tissue to reveal the inner workings of the heart. This technology exploits natural speckle patterns in myocardial tissue, providing a non-invasive method to define cardiac tissue motion and deformation, and demonstrates its effectiveness and application potential in detecting ischemia compared with other techniques. Especially important.
Spot patterns are a mixture of interference patterns and natural sound wave reflections, which are called spots or marks.
The random nature of the spot pattern allows each region of the heart muscle to have its own unique spot pattern, which may be why the movement of the heart can be accurately tracked using STE technology. The key to this process is how to use algorithms to identify and track changes in these spots over time. By interpreting these changes, experts can obtain quantitative and qualitative information about the heart's movements, which is crucial for diagnosing and treating cardiovascular disease.
Basic principles
In the basic principle of STE, the randomness of the spot pattern gives each myocardial region a unique spot pattern, and some areas are called "kernels." The pattern of this kernel remains relatively stable from image frame to image frame and can therefore be identified in subsequent frames using a best match search algorithm. Commonly used search algorithms include "sum of absolute differences", which is comparable in accuracy to cross-correlation.
Speckle tracking can track in two dimensions, but its lateral tracking ability is relatively weak when the longitudinal resolution of ultrasound far exceeds the lateral resolution.
Once the motion of the core is determined, a displacement curve is obtained and the strain and strain rate between the two cores can be calculated. Through this technology, various movement patterns of the heart can be analyzed without being affected by the propagation angle. For clinical applications that focus primarily on structural changes within the heart, speckle tracking shows great potential, and its results can provide useful data support when compared with MRI and tissue Doppler techniques.
Applications and limitations
As STE becomes increasingly mature, its application in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases is becoming more and more important. The investigation shows that the strain results obtained through STE are highly consistent with the results of other techniques and can extract rich cardiac motion information. However, the technology also suffers from some limitations, such as frame rate difficulties when the heart rate is too high, resulting in reduced tracking quality.
For speckle tracking technology, the biggest challenge is the lack of standardization, and the algorithms of each ultrasound equipment supplier and analysis software vary to varying degrees.
In addition, current technology still faces challenges in measuring deformation in different directions, especially under images at specific locations, where the accuracy of measurement is easily affected. Therefore, although the technology and application of STE have broad prospects, various limitations also remind us that we need to interpret the data carefully when facing different clinical scenarios.
Clinical Application
From the perspective of clinical application, STE technology has a very wide range of applications. Various conditions including but not limited to coronary artery disease, myocardial infarction, stress ultrasound, valvular disease and ventricular hypertrophy can be analyzed and diagnosed in detail using STE technology. This makes STE an indispensable method in current cardiac function assessment.
Overall, the development of speckle tracking echocardiography technology demonstrates the significant progress of modern medicine in the diagnosis of heart diseases. In the future, with the further improvement of technology and the realization of standardization, can we overcome its existing limitations and further improve the diagnosis rate and treatment effect of heart disease?
