Physiological changes in regional and global left-ventricular strain during exercise - a cardiac magnetic resonance imaging study using tagging and feature tracking in healthy volunteers

Background Techniques for the evaluation of regionaland global left-ventricular strain parameters are emerging in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging. Some of these techniques require dedicated CMR sequences at the time of the imaging examination, others are based on post-processing of routine imaging. Little is known about normal values and range of these parameters, assessed by CMR. Moreover, most studies examined subjects under rest conditions only. Objective of our study was to evaluate a tagging and a feature-tracking approach in a cohort of healthy volunteers under rest conditions and during exercise.