Prenatal Tisse Velocity Imaging of the Heart : A new approach to assess fetal myocardial function

Sammanfattning: The general aim of this thesis has been to evaluate color‐coded tissue velocity imaging (TVI) as an approach to developing a new, non‐invasive assessment method for fetal myocardial function. Such a method could hypothetically give early indications of fetal pathology, as myocardial dysfunction is often the consequence when the circulation tries to adapt to deteriorating situations. This would be beneficial in clinical decision making when evaluating fetal well‐being in a wide range of pregnancy associated conditions, to facilitate risk assessment and to monitor the benefit of therapeutic interventions.TVI is an ultrasound technique that enables quantification of longitudinal myocardial motion with high temporal resolution, which is essential in the identification of fetal myocardial movements of short duration. Furthermore, the longitudinal motion is mainly determined by subendocardial fibers that usually become abnormal in the very early stages of cardiac dysfunction as they are sensitive to milder degrees of hypoxia. Thus, TVI has the potential to give early indications of impaired fetal myocardial function and hypothetically facilitate the detection of intrauterine hypoxia. Hypoxia is a common phenomenon of many pathological conditions in pregnancy, from which a substantial number of children either die or acquire permanent brain injury during delivery every year.After having established optimal sampling requirements and ensured an acceptable reproducibility for TVI measurements of the fetal myocardium, normal reference values were determined feasible and sensitive enough to provide insight into maturational changes in myocardial function. This provided a foundation that should enable further investigations and was partly accomplished using the cardiac state diagram (CSD) to accurately time the myocardial events during a cardiac cycle according to the motion shifts of the atrioventricular plane.The demonstrated results are promising and the general conclusion of this thesis is that TVI contributes to increasing the knowledge and understanding of fetal myocardial function and dysfunction. Used together with CSD this technique has great potential as an assessment method. However, further testing of the clinical potential is needed in larger study populations concerning the pathological or physiological questions at issue, and additional development of the method is required to render the method simple enough to be of potential aid in clinical practice.