Abstract
Ultrasound Strain rate estimation provides a quantitative measure of cardiac muscle function, which makes it an important tool for the diagnosis and monitoring of heart disease. The most common approach for strain rate estimation, speckle tracking through block matching, assumes the matching block undergoes a rigid translation between frames, which is not true in strained tissue. We present a method for estimating the strain rate by tracking off-grid point scatterers between transmissions in the channel data. Our method attempts to reconstruct the observed signals as a sum of point sources, akin to Gaussian Splatting. We evaluate our method on 2D simulated phantom data and show we obtain lower error in the estimated strain rate maps and are better able to detect an ischemic region in the myocardium. We also show that our method is able to recover strain rate maps from in-vivo data. All code is available at \url{https://github.com/vincentvdschaft/strain-off-grid}.
Links to Paper and Supplementary Materials
Main Paper (Open Access Version): https://papers.miccai.org/miccai-2026-sat/paper/Off_Grid_024.pdf
SharedIt Link: Not yet available
SpringerLink (DOI): Not yet available
Supplementary Material: Not Submitted
Link to Open Review
Open Review Page: https://openreview.net/forum?id=DwdQQ9g0Wz
BibTex
@InProceedings{vanVin_Strain_MICCAISAT2026,
author = { van de Schaft, Vincent AND van Sloun, Ruud J. G.},
title = { { Strain Rate Estimation from Ultrasound Channel Data } },
booktitle = {Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention -- MICCAI 2026 Workshops and Challenges},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},
volume = {LNCS 17277},
month = {pending},
page = {pending}
}