The duration of systole on an electrocardiogram is proposed as a direct measure of myocardial work to assess prognosis in heart disease.
All clinicians agree that patients with heart disease may have an uncertain prognosis, with the main reason due to the limited resources to analyze the functionality of the myocardium. Therefore, it is desirable to find abnormalities that are not indirect symptoms of a weakness of the vascular system, but rather, depend more directly on the work of the myocardium.
L. S. Fridericia (2003) studied this question.