Abstract
Echocardiography is the standard method for assessing myocardial function in patients with ischemic heart disease. The acquisition and interpretation of echocardiographic images, however, remains a highly specialized task which often relies entirely on the subjective visual assessment of the reader and requires therefore, particular training and expertise. Myocardial deformation imaging allows quantifying myocardial function far beyond what can be done with sole visual assessment. It can improve the interpretation of regional dysfunction and offers sensitive markers of induced ischemia which can be used for stress tests. In the following, we recapitulate shortly the pathophysiological and technical basics and explain in a practical manner how we use this technique in investigating patients with ischemic heart disease.
Highlights
Assessing the impact of ischemic heart disease on cardiac function is one of the key tasks of routine clinical echocardiography
The careful observation of global and regional ventricular function and morphology in resting images, allows describing and distinguishing acute ischemia, scar and infarct related remodeling while stress echocardiographic methods may be used to assess the severity of coronary stenosis or to identify viable myocardium
Tissue Doppler and speckle tracking based myocardial deformation imaging allows quantifying myocardial function far beyond what can be done with sole visual assessment
Summary
Assessing the impact of ischemic heart disease on cardiac function is one of the key tasks of routine clinical echocardiography. Tissue Doppler and speckle tracking based myocardial deformation imaging allows quantifying myocardial function far beyond what can be done with sole visual assessment. Major advantages of TDI derived strain measurements are the very high temporal resolution and the relative robustness if image quality is limited.
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