Application of tissue Doppler to interpretation of exercise echocardiography: diagnostics of ischemia localization in patients with ischemic heart disease.

UNLABELLED

Development of optimal methods for the objective non-invasive diagnosis of coronary artery disease remains a challenge for imaging techniques in stress tests.

AIM

The aim of this study was to obtain quantitative diagnostic criteria TDI which could detect significant coronary artery disease during exercise echocardiography.

METHODS AND RESULTS

We evaluated regional systolic and diastolic myocardial functions of 123 patients by pulsed wave tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) in eight segments of left ventricle during exercise stress testing. Diagnostic criteria were obtained by comparing TDI and coronary angiography data. Best cut-points of velocity parameters allowed developing two diagnostic models for the detection of left anterior descending (LAD) and circumflex (LCx) artery diseases. The accuracy of the TDI diagnostic model for LAD-disease was 86.2% and for LCx-disease 78.3%. There were no criteria for the detection of RCA disease in this study.

CONCLUSION

So TDI is a very accurate method for the detection of LAD- and LCx-disease during exercise stress echocardiography.