A modified echocardiographic protocol with intrinsic plausibility control to determine intraventricular asynchrony based on TDI and TSI.

H Dreger, AC Borges, B Ismer, S Schattke, B Stegemann, G Baumann, C Melzer

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Background
Established methods to determine asynchrony suffer from high intra- and interobserver variability and failed to improve patient selection for cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT). Thus, there is a need for easy and robust approaches to reliably assess cardiac asynchrony.

Methods and Results
We performed echocardiography in 100 healthy subjects and 33 patients with left bundle branch block (LBBB). To detect intraventricular asynchrony, we combined two established methods, i.e., tissue synchronization imaging (TSI) and tissue Doppler imaging (TDI). The time intervals from the onset of aortic valve opening (AVO) to the peak systolic velocity (S') were measured separately in six basal segments in the apical four-, two-, and three-chamber view. Color-coded TSI served as an intrinsic plausibility control and helped to identify the correct S' measuring point in the TDI curves. Next, we identified the segment with the shortest AVO-S' interval. Since this segment most likely represents vital and intact myocardium it served as a reference for other segments. Segments were considered asynchronous when the delay between the segment in question and the reference segment was above the upper limit of normal delays derived from the control population. Intra- and interobserver variability were 7.0% and 7.7%, respectively.

Conclusion
Our results suggest that combination of TDI and TSI with intrinsic plausibility control improves intra- and interobserver variability and allows easy and reliable assessment of cardiac asynchrony.
Original languageEnglish
Article number7
JournalCardiovascular Ultrasound
Volume7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 25 Sept 2009

Bibliographical note

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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