An important assessment in patients with ischemic heart disease is whether myocardial contractility may improve after treatment. The prediction of myocardial contractility improvement is generally performed under physical or pharmalogical stress conditions. In this paper, we present a technique to build a statistical model of healthy myocardial contraction using independent component analysis. ...

Myocardial post-systolic shortening is characterized by a large variability in both duration and magnitude. Although typically occurring in a setting of ischemic heart disease, this regionally asynchronous myocardial contraction is considered a normal finding in approximately one-third of myocardial segments in healthy subjects, as long as the magnitude is low and the systolic strain is preserv...

OBJECTIVES This study sought to examine the changes in ventricular function of hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) between the first 2 stages of surgical palliation. BACKGROUND The mortality risk between first and second stages of surgical palliation in HLHS remains high. Right ventricular (RV) dysfunction predicts mortality. Postulated mechanisms include a maladaptive contraction pattern,...

This study aimed to investigate the clinical indicators of myocardial injury induced by type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). The study includes 23 patients with T2DM, also having myocardial injury, identified as the illness group (IG), and 46 T2DM patients, randomly assigned to the control group (CG). The IG was subdivided into the dysfunctional myocardial contraction group (DCG, n = 10; left ventr...

Doppler myocardial imaging is a new cardiac ultrasound technique based on the principles of colour Doppler imaging which can determine myocardial velocities by detecting the changes of phase-shift of the ultrasound signal returning directly from the myocardium. To determine the normal range of transmural velocities in healthy hearts a prospective study was carried out involving 42 normal subjec...

AIMS The aim of this study was to investigate whether prolonged and dispersed myocardial contraction duration assessed by tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) may serve as risk markers for cardiac events (documented arrhythmia, syncope, and cardiac arrest) in patients with long QT syndrome (LQTS). METHODS AND RESULTS Seventy-three patients with genetically confirmed LQTS (nine double- and 33 single-m...

Abstract Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: None. Background The Myocardial contraction fraction (MCF% – stroke volume over myocardial volume) is an alternative/complementary measure cardiac function to the ejection (EF% end diastolic volume), (1–2). It dimensionless, does not need allometric scaling, easy compute and intuitive: produced per unit myocardium, with some data for it...

BACKGROUND Most volatile anesthetics exhibit a direct myocardial depressant effect. This side effect often limits their applicability in patients with impaired cardiac function. Xenon is a new gaseous anesthetic that did not show any adverse cardiovascular effects in clinical and experimental studies. The authors tested the hypothesis that xenon does not affect myocardial contractility or the p...

Li D, Yang C, Chen Y, Tian J, Liu L, Dai Q, Wan X, Xie Z. Identification of a PKCε-dependent regulation of myocardial contraction by epicatechin-3-gallate. Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol 294: H345–H353, 2008. First published October 19, 2007; doi:10.1152/ajpheart.00785.2007.—In this study, the effects of tea catechins and tea theaflavins on myocardial contraction were examined in isolated rat ...