[Measurement of systolic time intervals by echocardiographic and conventional methods (author's transl)]

In 25 patients the systolic time intervals were simultaneously measured by echocardiography and by the conventional method using the ECG, phonocardiogram and indirect carotid pulse tracing. Beat-to-beat-analysis showed no significant difference for QS2 (367.1 +/- 26.7 ms vs. 367.9 +/- 26.5 ms). In contrast, the LVET measured by echocardiography was significantly longer than the LVET taken from the indirect carotid pulse tracing (275.3 +/- 26.3 ms vs. 266.2 +/- 25.9 ms, p less than 0.001). As a consequence, the echocardiographic PEP was significantly shorter than the conventionally measured PEP (91.3 +/- 18.0 ms vs 100.9 +/- 22.7 ms, p less than 0.001). Furthermore, both methods showed the weakest correlation for the ratio PEP/LVET. We conclude that STI can be reproducibly measured by echocardiography, which will lead to significantly different values for the STI compared to those measured by the conventional method.