A clinician's guide to tissue Doppler imaging.

Principles of TDI Doppler echocardiography relies on detection of the shift in frequency of ultrasound signals reflected from moving objects. With this principle, conventional Doppler techniques assess the velocity of blood flow by measuring high-frequency, low-amplitude signals from small, fast-moving blood cells. In TDI, the same Doppler principles are used to quantify the higheramplitude, lower-velocity signals of myocardial tissue motion. There are important limitations to TD interrogation. As with all Doppler techniques, TDI measures only the vector of motion that is parallel to the direction of the ultrasound beam. In addition, TDI measures absolute tissue velocity and is unable to discriminate passive motion (related to translation or tethering) from active motion (fiber shortening or lengthening). The emerging technology of Doppler strain imaging provides a means to differentiate true contractility from passive myocardial motion by looking at relative changes in tissue velocity. TDI can be performed in pulsedwave and color modes. Pulsed-wave TDI is used to measure peak myocardial velocities and is particularly well suited to the measurement of long-axis ventricular motion because the longitudinally oriented endocardial fibers are most parallel to the ultrasound beam in the apical views. Because the apex remains relatively stationary throughout the cardiac cycle, mitral annular motion is a good surrogate measure of overall longitudinal left ventricular (LV) contraction and relaxation.1 To measure longitudinal myocardial velocities, the sample volume is placed in the ventricular myocardium immediately adjacent to the mitral annulus. The cardiac cycle is represented by 3 waveforms (Figure): (1) Sa, systolic myocardial velocity above the baseline as the annulus descends toward the apex; (2) Ea, early diastolic myocardial relaxation velocity below the baseline as the annulus ascends away from the apex; and (3) Aa, myocardial velocity associated with atrial contraction. The lower-case “a” for annulus or “m” for myocardial (Ea or Em) and the superscripted prime symbol (E') are used to differentiate tissue Doppler velocities from conventional mitral inflow. Pulsed-wave TDI has high temporal resolution but does not permit simultaneous analysis of multiple myocardial segments. With color TDI, a color-coded representation of myocardial velocities is superimposed on gray-scale 2-dimensional or M-mode images to indicate the direction and velocity of myocardial motion. Color TDI mode has the advantage of increased spatial resolution and the ability to evaluate multiple structures and segments in a single view.