Calculating cardiac strains through speckle tracking echocardiography (STE) has shown promise as prognostic markers linked to functional indices and disease outcomes. However, the presence of acoustic shadowing often challenges the accuracy of STE in small animals such as rodents. The shadowing arises due to the complex anatomy of rodents, with operator dexterity playing a significant role in image quality. The effects of the semi-transparent shadows are further exacerbated in right ventricular (RV) imaging due to the thinness and rapid motion of the RV free wall (RVFW). The movement of the RVFW across the shadows distorts speckle tracking and produces unnatural and non-physical strains. The objective of this study was to minimize the effects of shadowing on STE by distinguishing "out-of-shadow" motion and identifying speckles in and out of shadow. Parasternal 2D echocardiography was performed, and short-axis B-mode (SA) images of the RVFW were acquired for a rodent model of pulmonary hypertension (n = 1). Following image acquisition, a denoising algorithm using edge-enhancing anisotropic diffusion (EED) was implemented, and the ensuing effects on strain analysis were visualized using a custom STE pipeline. Speckles in the shadowed regions were identified through a correlation between the filtered image and the original acquisition. Thus, pixel movement across the boundary was identified by enhancing the distinction between the shadows and the cardiac wall, and non-physical strains were suppressed. The strains obtained through STE showed expected patterns with enhanced circumferential contractions in the central region of the RVFW in contrast to smaller and nearly uniform strains derived from the unprocessed images.

There are several lung diseases that lead to alterations in regional lung mechanics, including acute respiratory distress syndrome. Such alterations can lead to localized underventilation of the affected areas resulting in the overdistension of the surrounding healthy regions. They can also lead to the surrounding alveoli expanding unevenly or distorting. Therefore, the quantification of the regional deformation in the lungs offers insights into identifying the regions at risk of lung injury. Although few recent studies have developed image processing techniques to quantify the regional volumetric deformation in the lung from dynamic imaging, the presence and extent of distortional deformation in the lung, and its correlation with volumetric deformation, remain poorly understood. In this study, we present a method that uses the four-dimensional displacement field obtained from image registration to quantify both regional volumetric and distortional deformation in the lung. We used dynamic computed tomography scans in a healthy rat over the course of one respiratory cycle in free breathing. Non-rigid image registration was performed to quantify voxel displacement during respiration. The deformation gradient was calculated using the displacement field and its determinant was used to quantify regional volumetric deformation. Regional distortion was calculated as the ratio of maximum to minimum principal stretches using the isochoric part of the Cauchy green tensor. We found an inverse correlation between volumetric strains and distortion indicating that poorly expanding alveoli tend to experience larger distortion. The combination of regional volumetric strains and distortion may serve as high-fidelity biomarkers to identify the regions at risk of most adverse lung injuries.

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