Analysis of motion tracking in echocardiographic image sequences: influence of system geometry and point-spread function.

This paper focuses on motion tracking in echocardiographic ultrasound images. The difficulty of this task is related to the fact that echographic image formation induces decorrelation between the underlying motion of tissue and the observed speckle motion. Since Meunier's seminal work, this phenomenon has been investigated in many simulation studies as part of speckle tracking or optical flow-based motion estimation techniques.

Statistical modeling of the radio-frequency signal for partially- and fully-developed speckle based on a generalized gaussian model with application to echocardiography.

We have shown previously that the statistics of the radio-frequency (RF) signals may be faithfully modeled through the so-called K(RF) distribution, in situations ranging from fully to partially-developed speckle. We demonstrate in this paper that the generalized Gaussian provides a reliable and computationally convenient approximation of the K(RF). The performance of the parameters estimators for the two distributions is evaluated and compared in terms of their bias and variance through numerical simulations.