Left ventricular wall stress and thickness from 3D echocardiographyin hypertensive patients

摘要

The authors applied a previously described method for 3D LVreconstruction from a limited number of long-axis 2D echocardiographicimages to obtain epicardial and endocardial surfaces. By intersecting aregularly-spaced set of lines perpendicular to the center-surface withthe endocardial and epicardial surfaces, LV local thickness wasmeasured. Accuracy was improved by considering cubic spline patchesrather than planar ones. LV volumes, mass and Janz's stress index werecomputed. The goal of this work was to quantitatively evaluate thedegree of LV hypertrophy, its spatial distribution in 21 patients withhypertension and to compare them to the standard M-mode mass values.Results indicate a good correlation between conventionalechocardiographic and 3D estimated mass. Different patterns in thespatial distribution of myocardial hypertrophy were responsible for ascattering of data