Echocardiographic measurements of right heart size and function in healthy horses.

The research aimed to develop reliable echocardiographic methods for measuring the size and functionality of a horse’s right heart.

Objective

• The study was geared towards creating reliable and repeatable echocardiographic measurements of size and functionality in a horse’s right-sided heart.

Methodology

• The team chose ten healthy, untrained adult trotter horses for this descriptive study.
• The selected horses underwent repeated echocardiography performed by two sonographers.
• The sonographers used both standard and non-standard views, achieved from right and left parasternal positions.
• The non-standard views involved specific focuses on the right atrium, the pulmonary artery, and the right ventricle, including anatomical M-mode of tricuspid annular motion.
• They also used a left parasternal long-axis view focused on the right ventricle and left parasternal pulsed wave Doppler recording of pulmonary flow.
• Two observers performed the off-line analysis, employing two-dimensional, M-mode, pulsed wave Doppler, tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) and two-dimensional speckle tracking (2DST) measurements to assess the right ventricle’s size and functionality.
• The team considered the acquisition and measurement variability by computing the coefficients of variation (CV) through a one-way repeated measures analysis of variance.
• They classified the degree of variability as low (if CV was less than 15%), moderate (if CV ranged between 15-25%), or high (if CV was more than 25%).

Results

• They found low variability in most of the two-dimensional and M-mode measurements of the right ventricle, right atrial and pulmonary artery size.
• The two-dimensional, M-mode and pulsed wave Doppler measurements of right ventricular function demonstrated low to moderate variability.
• Right ventricular functional measurements by using 2DST showed low variability, except for segmental strain rate.
• Measurements based on TDI showed variability ranging from low to high, with lower variability for timing than for peak measurements and lower variability for velocity compared to deformation measurements.

Conclusion

• The study concludes that the size and function of a horse’s right heart can be reliably assessed using these echocardiographic methods. They note that there is a low degree of variability in the readings, making the methods reliable and accurate.