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Updated: Jul 16, 2025

Transthoracic Speckle Tracking Echocardiography for the Quantitative Assessment of Left Ventricular Myocardial Deformation
Published on: October 20, 2016
Development and validation of a rapid visual technique for left ventricular hypertrophy detection from the
Sulaiman Somani1,2, J Weston Hughes3,4, Euan A Ashley3
1Division of Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States.
Introduction:
Left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) detection techniques on by electrocardiogram (ECG) are cumbersome to remember with modest performance. This study validated a rapid technique for LVH detection and measured its performance against other techniques.
Methods:
This was a retrospective cohort study of patients at Stanford Health Care who received ECGs and resting transthoracic echocardiograms (TTE) from 2006 through 2018. The novel technique, Witteles-Somani (WS), assesses for S- and R-wave overlap on adjacent precordial leads. The WS, Sokolow-Lyon, Cornell, and Peguero-Lo Presti techniques were algorithmically implemented on ECGs. Classification metrics, receiver-operator curves, and Pearson correlations measured performance. Age- and sex-adjusted Cox proportional hazard models evaluated associations between incident cardiovascular outcomes and each technique.
Results:
A total of 53,333 ECG-TTE pairs from 18,873 patients were identified. Of all ECG-TTE pairs, 21,638 (40.6%) had TTE-diagnosed LVH. The WS technique had a sensitivity of 0.46, specificity of 0.66, and AUROC of 0.56, compared to Sokolow-Lyon (AUROC 0.55), Cornell (AUROC 0.63), and Peguero-Lo Presti (AUROC 0.63). Patients meeting LVH by WS technique had a higher risk of cardiovascular mortality [HR 1.18, 95% CI (1.12, 1.24), P < 0.001] and a higher risk of developing any cardiovascular disease [HR 1.29, 95% CI (1.22, 1.36), P < 0.001], myocardial infarction [HR 1.60, 95% CI (1.44, 1.78), P < 0.005], and heart failure [HR 1.24, 95% CI (1.17, 1.32), P < 0.001].
Conclusions:
The WS criteria is a rapid visual technique for LVH detection with performance like other LVH detection techniques and is associated with incident cardiovascular outcomes.
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