ABSTRACT
Recent and ongoing advances in the improvement of quality and potential of echocardiography leave no doubt about its potential for assessment of myocardial mechanics during the next decade. For this purpose, echocardiography has two main advantages over other imaging modalities (apart from its noninvasiveness and its widespread use in clinical practice). First, its relatively high temporal resolution [from 20 up to over 100 images per cycle for two-dimensional (2D) sequences and 20-40 images per cycle for three-dimensional (3D) ones], a prerequisite for the accurate assessment of fast patterns or peak events, and an absolutely necessary condition to guarantee the physiological relevance of velocity and acceleration measurements (fi rstand second-order temporal derivatives of displacement), or strain rate (fi rst temporal derivative of strain). Second, echocardiography depicts the presence of local speckle (interference) patterns, “attached” to the tissue, along the sequence, which allows the direct visualization of local motion and deformation and their quantifi cation through tracking-based techniques.
