Clinical Utility of Three-Dimensional Speckle-Tracking Echocardiography in Heart Failure

Abstract

Heart failure (HF) is an extremely major health problem with gradually increasing incidence in developed and developing countries. HF may lead to cardiac remodeling; thus, advanced imaging techniques are required to comprehensively evaluate cardiac mechanics. Recently, three-dimensional speckle-tracking echocardiography (3D-STE) has been developed as a novel imaging technology that is based on the three-dimensional speckle-tracking on the full volume three-dimensional datasets. Three-dimensional speckle-tracking echocardiography allows a more accurate evaluation of global and regional myocardial performance, assessment of cardiac mechanics, detection of subclinical cardiac dysfunction, and prediction of adverse clinical events in a variety of cardiovascular diseases. Therefore, this review summarizes the clinical usefulness of 3D-STE in patients with HF.

Global left ventricular strains and left atrial volumes are not associated in healthy adults – Detailed analysis from the three-dimensional speckle-tracking echocardiographic MAGYAR-Healthy Study

“…In clinical cardiology, it is of paramount importance that all volumes and functional properties of LV and LA can be determined with quantitative characteristics, in one study, in an easy-to-learn non-invasive way. 3DSTE seems to be an ideal method to do this, as digitally collected focused 3D databases can be used to create virtual spatial models of certain heart chambers, which can be used to determine not only their volumes respecting the cardiac cycle, but contractility-features represented by strains simultaneously [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] , [5] , [6] . 3DSTE-derived LV strains [21] , [22] , [23] and LA volumes [24] , [25] are validated.…”

“…The software stitches subvolumes recorded at different times to each other enables the creation of so-called stitching artifacts, which complicated the analysis. In addition, respiratory and movement artefacts and arrhythmias can make it difficult to carry out the tests [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] , [5] , [6] . The overall feasibility proved to be only 55 %, which means that 45 % of healthy subjects were excluded due to inferior image quality limiting the use of 3DSTE in real-life settings.…”

“…The software stitches subvolumes recorded at different times to each other enables the creation of so-called stitching artifacts, which complicated the analysis. In addition, respiratory and movement artefacts and arrhythmias can make it difficult to carry out the tests [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] , [5] , [6] .…”

“…To achieve optimal image quality, 6 subvolumes were collected within 6 heart cycles, which were automatically merged into a full volume dataset. All offline analyses were performed using the same vendor-provided 3D Wall Motion Tracking software version 2.7 (Ultra Extend, Toshiba Medical Systems, Tokyo, Japan) [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] , [5] , [6] .…”

“…Three-dimensional (3D) speckle-tracking echocardiography (3DSTE) can be considered one of the most modern, easy-to-perform, non-invasive cardiovascular imaging procedures suitable for simultaneous quantification of heart chambers [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] , [5] , [6] . It can be used to perform physiological studies to investigate the interaction of certain heart chambers, e.g.…”