Acute and chronic myocardial infarct differentiation using atrial kick induced strain (AKIS) imaging

We have previously shown that the passive ventricular stretch induced during the active filling phase of the heart can be used to make images correlated to the passive mechanical stiffness of the ventricles. In the initial feasibility study chronic infarcts and ablation lesions were differentiated from healthy myocardium. Here we provide motivation for our novel strain metric and demonstrate that AKIS imaging can be used to identify the softening that occurs early after the onset of ischemia in acute infarct scenarios.