Abstract
An analytical procedure has been developed for deriving an overall value of myocardial elasticity for patients in vivo. Here three other procedures for estimating myocardium stiffness, from other investigators, are applied to data representing the same set of patients. They relate to (a) myocardial stiffness as a function of pressure, (b) myocardial stiffness as a function of wall stress and (c) myocardial stiffness as a function of geometry and stress. An assessment of the validity of each of these three relationships is made. The first two of these are shown to be poor predictors of myocardial elastic modulus whereas the use of an ellipsoidal geometric model, as proposed in the third, was found to give qualitatively good results.
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