Method of myocardial velocities measurements based on combination of echocardiography and Doppler tissue imaging

This paper describes a new and original strategy for measuring and characterising the left ventricular myocardial motion in terms of velocity measurements. Our method is based on the combination of echocardiographic images and Doppler tissue imaging. It allows decomposition of the complex myocardial wall velocity into three components: rotation, contraction and translation. The results are shown on diagrams of velocities as a function of time; in fact, we found each velocity component for all the images throughout the cardiac cycle. Furthermore, we propose visualizing the results of myocardial wall regional contraction in reconstructed images in pseudo-color. This quantisation of wall motion velocities by ultrasound imaging should be very helpful for physicians in the diagnosis and prognosis of cardiac diseases.