Application of speckle tracking to follow the edges of the inferior vena cava

The pulsatility of the inferior vena cava can be an indicator to estimate important clinical parameters such as the volecmic status of a patient or the right atrial pressure. The manual measurement of the pulsatility is a time consuming task, and the results do not have an high repeatability since they can depend on multiple factors such as the experience of the physician or the section of the vena cava taken into consideration. To reduce the magnitude of those problems, an algorithm to track the displacements of the edges of the vena cava was developed at the Polytechnic University of Turin. The aim of this thesis was to develop an algorithm having the same purpose, but by using a different method: the speckle tracking. Speckle tracking is a common technique used in echocardiography to follow the displacements of the myocardial tissue. To validate the functionality of the speckle tracking algorithm, the comparison of the diameters as well as the pulsatility obtained with both algorithms was done. Also, since in literature the speckle tracking has been shown to depend on the acquisition's frame rate, the performance of the algorithm was evaluated by simulating lower frame rate acquisitions compared to the original.