ABSTRACT Quantification of the relative myocardial deformation rate, or strain rate, is an emerging capability to aid a cardiologist in assessing myocardial function. Ultrasound Doppler techniques can be used to compute tissue motion relative to a transducer. The myocardial strain rate can be computed as the localized spatial derivative of the tissue velocity. Such a strain-rate estimate is typically numerically noisy. We present the relevant speckle statistics to faciliate the computation of the strain rate based on a weighted least squares regression, with statistically appropriate weights.
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