Tissue Doppler, triplane echocardiography, and speckle tracking echocardiography: different ways of measuring longitudinal myocardial velocity and deformation parameters. A comparative clinical study.

AIMS: The aim of our study was to compare global and segmental longitudinal myocardial velocity and deformation obtained from three different echocardiographic techniques of postprocessing analysis (two-dimensional tissue Doppler imaging (2D TDI), triplane tissue Doppler imaging (3D TDI), and speckle tracking echocardiography (STE)), in a group of consecutive subjects referred to echocardiography with different clinical indications, and to assess their reproducibility. METHODS AND
RESULTS: Standard echocardiograms with high frame rate gray-scale images and color coded TDI apical views, and a single beat TDI triplane apical section of the left ventricle were acquired at two different times. Longitudinal velocity and deformation parameters were obtained in postprocessing in 103 subjects from TDI and STE derived curves, and absolute values were compared to test the variability of the three techniques. All the measures were repeated twice, for a test-retest study. The times to peak velocity and deformation were similar by TDI and STE; other parameters showed significant difference (P < 0.05), both for global and segmental analysis. Reproducibility (expressed by the coefficient of variation and the coefficient of correlation r, in a large part of cases > 0.9) was acceptable, meaning that measures obtained at two different times did not differ significantly in between.
CONCLUSION: TDI and speckle tracking are both feasible and reproducible. Myocardial velocity and deformation parameters obtained with them are significantly different. STE is the most reproducible technique, whereas TDI based measurements are lower reproducible. STE can easily be used during clinical follow up for its feasibility and high reproducibility.