There is widespread clinical interest in assessing the mechanical properties of tissues andvessel walls. This study investigated the importance of the test phantom in providing a realisticassessment of clinical wall tracking performance for a variety of ultrasound modalities. B-mode,colour Doppler and Tissue Doppler Imaging (TDI) cineloop images were acquired usinga Philips HDI5000 scanner and L12-5 probe. In-vivo longitudinal sections of 30 commoncarotid arteries and in-vitro images of pulsatile flow of a blood mimicking fluid through walledand wall-less tissue and vessel mimicking flow phantoms were analysed. Vessel wall trackingperformance was assessed for our new probabilistic B-mode algorithm (PROBAL), and 3different techniques implemented by Philips Medical Systems, based on B-mode edgedetection (LDOT), colour Doppler (CVIQ) and TDI (TDIAWM). Precision (standarddeviation/mean) of the peak systole dilations for respective PROBAL, LDOT, CVIQ andTDIAWM techniques were: 15.4 ± 8.4%, 23 ± 12.7%, 10 ± 10% and 10.3 ± 8.1% for the commoncarotid arteries; 6.4%, 22%, 11.6% and 34.5% for the wall-less flow phantom, 5.3%, 9.8%,23.4% and 2.7% for the C-flex walled phantom and 3.9%, 2.6%, 1% and 3.2% for the latexwalled phantom. The test phantom design and construction had a significant effect on themeasurement of wall tracking performance.