Tissue Doppler echocardiography

Tissue Doppler echocardiography (TDE) is a medical ultrasound technology, specifically a form of echocardiography that measures the velocity of the heart muscle (myocardium) through the phases of one or more heartbeats by the Doppler effect (frequency shift) of the reflected ultrasound. The technique is the same as for flow Doppler echocardiography measuring flow velocities. Tissue signals, however, have higher amplitude and lower velocities, and the signals are extracted by using different filter and gain settings. The terms tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) and tissue velocity imaging (TVI) are usually synonymous with TDE because echocardiography is the main use of tissue Doppler.

Like Doppler flow, tissue Doppler can be acquired both by spectral analysis (spectral density estimation) as pulsed Doppler^[1] and by the autocorrelation technique as colour tissue Doppler^[2] (duplex ultrasonography). While pulsed Doppler only acquires the velocity at one point at a time, colour Doppler can acquire simultaneous pixel velocity values across the whole imaging field. Pulsed Doppler on the other hand, is more robust against noise, as peak values are measured on top of the spectrum, and are unaffected of the presence of clutter (stationary reverberation noise).