Myocardial stretch propagation measurement with focused and diverging beams: a feasibility and reproducibility study in healthy volunteers

Left ventricular (LV) filling following atrial kick in late diastole generates LV myocardial stretch that propagates with a speed related to myocardial stiffness. Changes in myocardial stiffness have shown to be related to cardiac disease. Therefore, stretch propagation speed may detect pathologic myocardium. Our objective was two-fold. First, we wanted to compare the performance of ultrasound focused beams and diverging beams for the measurement of myocardial propagation speed: focused beams generate higher harmonics, therefore are expected to be less affected by clutter; but diverging beams enable a faster imaging sequence with less frame to frame decorrelation. Second, we wanted to evaluate the feasibility and reproducibility of both techniques in a group of healthy volunteers.