**Spackle Tracking Echocardiography**

**1** 

*Israel* 

**Assessment of Regional Longitudinal** 

**Echocardiography – A Validation Study** 

Friedman Zvi2, Reisner Shimon3, Beyar Rafael1 and Adam Dan1

Recently, there is an increasing body of evidence supporting the clinical importance of assessment of regional myocardial function as an essential tool for the evaluation of heart disease (Helm et al. 2005; Voigt et al. 2004, Liel-Cohen et al. 2010). In particular, numerous reports support the notion that diagnosis and management of coronary heart disease require the ability to adequately assess regional changes in myocardial function (Zwanenburg et al. 2005). Typical examples are the detection of ischemia or post acute myocardial infarction (AMI) during a stress test, even for nonocclusive coronary stenosis (Yip et al. 2004); Voigt and Flachskampf 2004), the differentiation of non-transmural vs. transmural infarct

One of the techniques currently in use for functional assessment of the cardiac muscle is Doppler based analysis of motion and deformation (Desco et al. 2002; Herbots et al. 2004; Voigt and Flachskampf 2004; Yip et al. 2003). The Doppler based techniques suffer from a number of critical limitations, the most significant one is that they are one dimensional and angle-dependent, leading to motion underestimation when the motion is not in the same orientation as the ultrasound beam at the point of measurement. Also, due to the cardiac movement during contraction, the segment being measured by the stable, but one dimensional beam, may be different at each moment. This limitation is significant since cardiac motion is very complex – at each location it consists of components that may either be independent from each other, such as heart translation, rotation and the active myocardial contraction, or that are physiologically related such as shortening along the myocardial fiber axis while thickening perpendicular to the fiber axis. These disadvantages limit the measurement to some sections of the heart, e.g. the septum and the free wall.

Ultrasound speckle tracking has been suggested for tissue strain and motion measurements (Bertrand et al., 1989; O'Donnell et al., 1991; O'Donnell et al., 1994). Recently, a different

infarction, or of a reversible from non-reversible ischemic functional impairment.

**1. Introduction** 

**Stain by Using Speckle Tracking** 

Vitek Nili1, Bachner-Hinenzon Noa1, Lempel Meytal1,

 *Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa* 

*1The Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa,* 

*3Department of Cardiology, Rambam Medical Center,* 

*2General Electric Healthcare,* 
