| Large interframe strain in speckle tracking based myocardial strain imaging causes significant peak hopping artifacts. In this paper, an algorithm combining Viterbi search with an improved correlation coefficient filter is proposed to reduce peak hopping artifacts. A 2-D simulation with average 8% compression and in-vivo data from a rabbit experiment were performed to validate the proposed algorithm. Significant reduction of peak hopping artifacts is shown in both simulation and experimental results. These results strongly suggest that the proposed algorithm is an effective tool to solve the peak hopping problem for myocardial imaging at large strain. |