Frame rate required for speckle tracking echocardiography: A quantitative clinical study with open-source, vendor-independent software.

Objectives: To determine the optimal frame rate at which reliable heart walls velocities can be assessed by speckle tracking.

Background: Assessing left ventricular function with speckle tracking is useful in patient diagnosis but requires a temporal resolution that can follow myocardial motion. In this study we investigated the effect of different frame rates on the accuracy of speckle tracking results, highlighting the temporal resolution where reliable results can be obtained.