Chronic Myocardial Infarct Visualization Using 3D Ultrasound

This dissertation aims to demonstrate the feasibility of direct infarct visualization using 3D medical ultrasound. The dissertation proceeds by providing the first ever demonstration of fully-sampled 3D ultrasonic speckle tracking using raw B-Mode data of the heart. The initial demonstration uses a Cramer-Rao lower bound limited displacement estimator. The dissertation then proceeds to develop an implementable method for biased time-delay estimation. Biased time-delay estimation is shown to surpass the traditional limits described by the Cramer-Rao lower bound in a mean square error sense. Additional characterization of this new class of estimator is performed to demonstrate that with easily obtainable levels of prior information it is possible to estimate displacements that do surpass the Cramer-Rao lower bound. Finally, using 2D and 3D realizations of biased displacement estimation (Bayesian speckle tracking) the passive strain induced in the ventricle walls during atrial systole is shown to be sufficient to distinguish healthy and chronically infarcted myocardium.