The use of feature tracking to assess ventricular strain during exercise stress CMR

Background Exercise stress testing is the most physiological method of inducing myocardial stress, but its application to clinical and scientific CMR has been limited because of problems arising from cardiac and respiratory motion during stress. Under pharmacological stress, left ventricular strain measurement abnormalities by CMR have been demonstrated to be earlier and more sensitive markers of contractile dysfunction than global left ventricular ejection fraction or development of regional wall motion abnormalities alone. There are several validated methods of measuring myocardial strain. A recently proposed method is feature tracking (FT), which has advantages over other methods in having shorter acquisition and analysis times and not requiring additional scanning as the features are tracked from the clinically standard cine steady-state free precession (SSFP) sequences. This offers a potential method to assess myocardial strain during exercise stress.