The feasibility and potential for the morphological and hemodynamic investigation of the heart has been increasing the use of the echocardiography in the research setting. Additionally, the development of new technologies, like the real time 3D echocardiography and speckle tracking, demands validation throughout experimental studies before being instituted in the clinical setting. This paper ai...

BACKGROUND Patients with preeclampsia are at risk for cardiovascular disease. Changes in cardiac function are subtle in preeclampsia and are difficult to quantify with conventional imaging. Strain measurements using speckle-tracking echocardiography have been used to sensitively quantify abnormalities in other disease settings. METHODS AND RESULTS We evaluated the feasibility and sensitivity ...

1. Yazıcı H, Fresko I, Yurdakul S. Behçet's syndrome: disease manifestations, management, and advances in treatment. Nat Clin Pract Rheumatol 2007; 3: 148-55. [CrossRef] 2. Özkan M, Emel O, Özdemir M, Yurdakul S, Koçak H, Özdoğan H, et al. M-mode, 2-D and Doppler echocardiographic study in 65 patients with Behçet's syndrome. Eur Heart J 1992; 13: 638-41. 3. Gürgün C, Ercan E, Ceyhan C, Yavuzgil...

BACKGROUND The diagnosis of acute myocarditis (AMC) and inflammatory cardiomyopathy (DCMi) can be difficult. Speckle tracking echocardiography with accurate assessments of regional contractility could have an outstanding importance for the diagnosis. METHODS AND RESULTS N = 25 patients with clinically diagnosed AMC who underwent endomyocardial biopsies (EMBs) were studied prospectively. Speck...

OBJECTIVE Apical transverse motion (ATM) is a new parameter for assessing left ventricular (LV) dyssynchrony. Speckle-tracking radial strain analysis seems to be the best method to identify potential responders to cardiac resynchronization therapy. The aim of our study was to investigate the association between ATM and radial dyssynchrony assessed by speckle-tracking echocardiography in patient...

AIMS Speckle tracking echocardiography has already demonstrated its clinical potential. However, its use in routine practice is jeopardized by recent reports on high inter-vendor variability of the measurements. As such, the European Association of CardioVascular Imaging (EACVI) and the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) set up a standardization task force, which was joined by all manuf...

Rationale: High-sensitivity in vivo phenotyping of cardiac function is essential for evaluating genes of interest and novel therapies in small animal models of cardiovascular disease. Transthoracic echocardiography is the principal method currently used for assessing cardiac structure and function; however, standard echocardiographic techniques are relatively insensitive to early or subtle chan...

AIMS The Speckle Tracking and Resynchronization (STAR) study used a prospective multi-centre design to test the hypothesis that speckle-tracking echocardiography can predict response to cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT). METHODS AND RESULTS We studied 132 consecutive CRT patients with class III and IV heart failure, ejection fraction (EF) < or =35%, and QRS > or =120 ms from three inter...

assessment of ventricular function in patients with heart failure symptoms. Recent advancements in echocardiography permit measurement of myocar­ dial mechanics through the use of strain imaging. Current techniques are either Doppler based or rely on speckle tracking in two dimensions, but each has limitations. Accordingly, three­dimensional wall motion tracking (3D­WMT) offers rapid acqui ­ si...

Background: At present, little research concerning the assessment of left atrial (LA) dysfunction in patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) using a combined by speckle tracking (STE) and real-time three-dimensional echocardiography (RT3DE) is available. The objective this study was to evaluate LA volume function STE RT3DE OSA.