Estimating Left Ventricular Relaxation and Filling Pressure Using Speckle Tracking Strain

In this of the Journal, Hayashi et al 11 report on their prospective multicenter study conducted in 5 institutions in Japan to compare correlation of TDI-and 2D speckle tracking-derived parameters with the time constant of LV pressure decay () and LV mean diastolic (LVMDP) in 77 patients with various cardiac diseases. The main findings of this study were that the correlation of e' with was weak, and that of peak longitudinal strain (LS) was the strongest among the 2D speckle tracking-derived parameters. In addition, the ratio of E to peak global LS (E/LS) correlated well with invasively measured LVMDP, which is significantly better than E/A or E/e'. The receiver-operating characteristic analysis showed that E/LS had the largest area under the curve for distinguishing elevated LVMDP compared with E/e' and E/A.