Digital angiography: an open-system dedicated to left ventricular function studies

The authors describe an efficient procedure for analyzing left-ventricular function (LV) parameters of patients undergoing a cardiac catheterization. Adequate assessment of LV systolic and diastolic function requires the simultaneous acquisition of volume pressure and wall thickness at a sampling rate of at least 50 per second. As most commercially available systems do not offer this performance, the authors incorporated several improvements in the digital vascular imaging (DVI) system and analytical processing unit (APU) of Philips. Complete processing of simultaneous LV geometry and pressure recordings is described. The procedure for deriving and retrieving ventricular data is emphasized