Tracking quality in plane-wave versus conventional cardiac ultrasound: a preliminary evaluation in-silico based on a state-of-the-art simulation pipeline

Fast cardiac ultrasound (US) imaging based on plane wave (PW) transmits is fostering significant research efforts. Coupled with a technique for deformation imaging, the new modality potentially allows for a more thorough assessment of cardiac function due to its higher temporal resolution. However, although the higher frame rate eases the tracking problem by enforcing speckle coherency, the loss in spatial resolution makes it harder. Moreover, at higher frame rate, a bias in the motion estimator will accumulate faster. It thus remains unclear whether myocardial tracking on PW recordings outperforms tracking on conventional images or vice versa. The aim of this study was therefore to directly contrast the intrinsic tracking quality of both acquisition schemes using a testing environment recently proposed by our lab.