Performance of ultrasonic speckle tracking in various tissues

The purpose of this study was to investigate the accuracy of ultrasound speckle tracking in various tissues. Results from two-dimensional tissue speckle tracking in liver, muscle, fat, and sponge samples are presented, while keeping other speckle tracking parameters constant. Speckle tracking performance was characterized both in terms of the magnitude of tracking errors and in terms of the percentage of correctly tracked displacement vectors. Speckle tracking in muscle tissue, which contains myofibrils and significant tissue microstructure, produced the highest percentage of correctly tracked vectors and smallest tracking errors relative to other tissues.