Ultrasonics
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This paper focuses on motion tracking in echocardiographic ultrasound images. The difficulty of this task is related to the fact that echographic image formation induces decorrelation between the underlying motion of tissue and the observed speckle motion. Since Meunier's seminal work, this phenomenon has been investigated in many simulation studies as part of speckle tracking or optical flow-based motion estimation techniques. ⋯ The correlation associated to the conventional block matching (BM) is in the range 0.45-0.02 when using cartesian data and in the range 0.65-0.2 for polar data. The corresponding correlation ranges for the bilinear deformable block matching are 0.98-0.2 and 0.98-0.55. In the same way these figures indicate that the bilinear deformable block matching yield a larger improvement when cartesian data are considered (correlation range increases from 0.45-0.02 to 0.98-0.2 in this case).