Assessment of Regional Myocardial Displacement via Spectral Tissue Doppler Compared with Color Tissue Tracking

The recent developments in tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) now more than ever permit the quantification of the myocardial function. In the current systems, tissue tracking or displacement curves are generated from color tissue Doppler data through the instantaneous temporal integral of velocity-time curves. The purpose of the present study was to assess regional myocardial displacement via spectral TDI. Maximum myocardial velocities were extracted from spectral pulsed tissue Doppler images using a developed computer program and were integrated throughout the cardiac cycle. Spectral tissue Doppler echocardiography was performed to evaluate longitudinal and radial functions in 20 healthy men, and the calculated end-systolic displacements were subsequently compared with the displacements measured from the same areas via color tissue tracking. According to the Bland-Altman analysis between spectral tissue tracking and color tissue tracking, the significant arithmetic mean was 7.34 mm with SD mean differences of ±2.24 mm in all of the evaluated segments. Despite significant differences (p<0.001), there was a good significant correlation between the two methods (r=0.79, p<0.001). A verification study showed that the proposed approach had the ability to assess regional myocardial displacement using spectral TDI, which can be used in a wider range of equipment than is currently possible.