Myocardial strain analysis by cardiac MRI and CT: Clinical implication

Myocardial strain analysis with cine-tagged MRI provides direct information of the timing of onset and peak of myocardial contraction, and allows evaluation of regional function and mechanical dyssynchrony. Cardiac MRI without restrictions of acoustic windows and narrow field of view has an advantage of measuremerits of right ventricular strain and the geometric difference in left ventricular contraction. We have reported that a contraction delay between right and left ventricle correlated with right ventricular dysfunction in adult congenital heart disease, and that spatial dyssynchrony was associated with reduction in cardiac sympathetic activity in non-ischemic heart failure. In addition, we propose to quantify CT myocardial strain using a new software named "motion coherence analysis". Motion coherence analysis processes the original 10-phase data set acquired at 10% intervals over the R-R interval with the computationally intense optimal flow algorithm producing a three-dimensional 100-phase data set throughout a cardiac cycle, and measures automatically the length for the margin of short- and long-axis of left ventricle. This can demonstrate the detail information on left ventricular deformation in both systole and diastole. Here, we present the clinical implication on CT myocardial strain using motion coherence analysis for aortic valve disease.