Speckle Tracking Echocardiography
A frame-by-frame tracking technique that follows tissue-borne speckle patterns through the cardiac cycle to measure myocardial deformation (strain).
Speckle tracking algorithms identify the unique acoustic-speckle pattern within each region of the myocardium on a 2D echocardiographic loop, then track that pattern frame by frame through the cardiac cycle. The displacement and deformation of these speckles yields strain, the fractional change in segment length.
Speckle-tracking-derived global longitudinal strain (GLS) is the canonical output and is more sensitive than LVEF for early systolic dysfunction.
Vendor-specific speckle-tracking algorithms historically produced different absolute GLS values, complicating cross-platform serial comparison. Vendor-agnostic AI strain (Us2.ai's implementation is validated across major vendors) addresses this with a single algorithm applied to standard 2D loops.