Automated tissue Doppler imaging for identification of occluded coronary artery in patients with suspected non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction

Purpose Identification of regional dysfunction is important for early risk stratification in patients with suspected non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI). Strain echocardiography enables quantification of segmental myocardial deformation. However, the clinical use is hampered by time-consuming manual measurements. We aimed to evaluate whether an in-house developed software for automated analysis of segmental myocardial deformation based on tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) could predict coronary occlusion in patients with suspected NSTEMI. Methods Eighty-four patients with suspected NSTEMI were included in the analysis. Echocardiography was performed at admission. Strain, strain rate and post-systolic shortening index (PSI) were analyzed by the automated TDI-based tool and the ability to predict coronary occlusion was assessed. For comparison, strain measurements were performed both by manual TDI-based analyses and by semi-automatic speckle tracking echocardiography (STE). All patients underwent coronary angiography. Results Seventeen patients had an acute coronary occlusion. Global strain and PSI by STE were able to differentiate occluded from non-occluded culprit lesions (respectively − 15.0% vs. -17.1%, and 8.1% vs. 5.1%, both p-values