A novel tissue tracking system (TTS) that enables automatic assessment of 2-dimensional strain of left ventricle (LV) segments simultaneously from gray-scale digital echocardiography images has been developed. We sought to validate the application of the system for automatic quantification of systolic wall thickening (WT) in human, by comparing the 2-dimensional radial strain (thickening) with manually measured systolic WT at the same segments. We assessed 202 LV segments from 101 digital echo images, with good and fair quality :mages, acquired from 35 subjects. There were good correlation and agreement between 2-dimensional radial strain assessed by TTS and manually measured systolic WT: in overall subjects (r=0.89, p<0.001), in good quality images (r=0.94, p<0.001). and in fair quality images (r=0.82, p<0.001).
The novel TTS provides method for automatic quantification of human LV systolic wall thickening.

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