Quantitative analysis of left ventricular deformation can provide valuable information about the extent of disease as well as the efficacy of treatment. In this work, we develop an adaptive multilevel compactly supported radial basis approach for deformation analysis in 3D+time echocardiography. Our method combines displacement information from shape tracking of myocardial boundaries (derived from B-mode data) with mid-wall displacements from radiofrequency-based ultrasound speckle tracking. We

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... evaluate our methods on open-chest canines (N=8) and show that our combined approach is better correlated to magnetic resonance taggingderived strains than either individual method. We also are able to identify regions of myocardial infarction (confirmed by postmortem analysis) using radial strain values obtained with our approach.