IMR Press / RCM / Volume 24 / Issue 5 / DOI: 10.31083/j.rcm2405145
Open Access Review
The Role of Myocardial Strain Imaging in the Pre- and Post-Operative Assessment of Patients with Single Ventricle
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1 Cardiology Department, G Papanicolaou Hospital, 57010 Thessaloniki, Greece
2 Department of Biochemical Sciences, Pomeranian Medical University, 70-204 Szczecin, Poland
3 Paediatric Cardiology Department, Amalia Children’s Hospital, Radboud University Medical Centre, 6525 GA Nijmegen, Netherlands
4 Paediatric Cardiology Department, Academic Centre for Congenital Heart Disease, 6500 HB Nijmegen, Netherlands
*Correspondence: dafnithess@yahoo.co.uk (Dafni Charisopoulou)
Rev. Cardiovasc. Med. 2023, 24(5), 145; https://doi.org/10.31083/j.rcm2405145
Submitted: 4 January 2023 | Revised: 31 March 2023 | Accepted: 10 April 2023 | Published: 18 May 2023
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Insight into Cardiac Strain Imaging)
Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s). Published by IMR Press.
This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license.
Abstract

The term “single ventricle” refers to a wide range of cardiac structural and functional abnormalities which cause the morphologically right or left ventricle to be hypoplastic or functionally inadequate. Patients with single-ventricle physiology have followed a series of palliative surgeries, resulting in the dominant ventricle supporting only the systemic circulation and the systemic venous return draining directly to the pulmonary arteries. Such patients present a progressive decline in myocardial performance, and their management is associated with high morbidity, mortality and resource usage. At each management step, imaging is critical in eligibility assessment, pre-procedural planning and prompt detection of myocardial dysfunction. However, the complex and asymmetric geometry of the dominant ventricle and its segmental wall motion abnormalities make the echocardiographic evaluation of myocardial performance in these patients rather challenging. Consequently, conventional 2-dimensional echo functional parameters, such as ejection fraction by Simpson’s biplane method or shortening fraction by M-mode, is complex and often not feasible to apply. On the other hand, speckle-tracking echocardiography is angle and geometry independent and has better reproducibility. As such, it constitutes an appealing method for assessing myocardial function in patients with single-ventricle hearts. Therefore, this review aims to investigate the role of myocardial strain imaging by speckle-tracking echocardiography in the pre-and post-operative assessment of patients with single-ventricle hearts.

Keywords
hypoplastic left heart syndrome
single ventricle
speckle-tracking echocardiography
strain
strain rate
outcomes
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