Assessment of strain and strain rate in embryonic chick heartin vivousing tissue Doppler optical coherence tomography

Abstract

We present a method to assess the in vivo radial strain and strain rate of the myocardial wall, which is of great importance to understand the biomechanics of cardiac development, using tissue Doppler optical coherence tomography (tissue-DOCT). Combining the structure and velocity information acquired from tissue-DOCT, the velocity distribution in the myocardial wall is plotted, from which the radial strain and strain rate are evaluated. The results demonstrate that tissue-DOCT can be used as a useful tool to describe tissue deformation, especially, the biomechanical characteristics of the embryonic heart.