[A historical perspective of tissue Doppler--when the starlight illuminates the myocardial function].

In 1842, an Austrian professor of mathematics and practical geometry, Christian Doppler, presented results of his investigations in the field of astronomy, without any clue that they would become important principles of modern ultrasound diagnostics. Almost a century later, at the University of Osaka, Japan, S. Satomura first applied these principles to measure the blood flow velocities in peripheral and extracranial brain-supplying vessels. The father of tissue Doppler imaging is Karl Isaaz, a French scientist, who was the first to realize the importance of clinical and diagnostic potentials of tissue Doppler imaging. Today, this noninvasive echocardiographic method is widely used in evaluation of myocardial function, especially in diagnosing of diastolic heart failure and early diagnosis of coronary artery disease, but also in diffrential diagnosis of restrictive cardiomyopathy and constrictive pericarditis and aberrant myocardial conduction. It is also an antecedent of "stain rate", a new sensitive method for diagnosing myocardial diseases.