• Jan D'hooge, Daniel Barbosa, Hang Gao, Piet Claus, David Prater, Jamie Hamilton, Peter Lysyansky, Yasuhiko Abe, Yasuhiro Ito, Helene Houle, Stefano Pedri, Rolf Baumann, James Thomas, Luigi P Badano, and EACVI/ASE/Industry Task Force to Standardize Deformation Imaging.
• Department of Cardiovascular Sciences, University of Leuven, Herestraat 49, Leuven 3000, Belgium jan.dhooge@uzleuven.be.
• Eur Heart J Cardiovasc Imaging. 2015 Aug 18.

AimsSpeckle tracking echocardiography has already demonstrated its clinical potential. However, its use in routine practice is jeopardized by recent reports on high inter-vendor variability of the measurements. As such, the European Association of CardioVascular Imaging (EACVI) and the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) set up a standardization task force, which was joined by all manufacturers of echocardiographic equipment as well as by companies offering software solutions only, with the ambition to tackle this problem by standardization and quality assurance (QA).Methods And ResultsIn this study, a first step towards QA of all commercially available tracking solutions based on computer-generated ultrasound images is presented. The accuracy of the products was acceptable with relative errors below 10% and intra-vendor reproducibility within 5%.ConclusionWhether these results can be extrapolated to the clinical setting is the topic of an ongoing study of the EACVI/ASE/Industry Task Force to standardize deformation imaging. This study was an important first step in the development of generally accepted tools for QA of speckle tracking echocardiography.Published on behalf of the European Society of Cardiology. All rights reserved. © The Author 2015. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

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