Introduction
Coronary heart disease (CHD) has been a hot spot in cardiovascular
disease research. It is a heart disease caused by of the formation of
coronary atherosclerotic plaque, which result in stenosis or obstruction
of the vascular lumen, leading to myocardial ischemia, hypoxia and
necrosis. According to the report published in 2016, CHD accounts for
20% of deaths in Europe, and is still one of the diseases with the
highest morbidity and mortality in the
world[1,2].
However, CHD involving three vessels disease (TVD) is a more extensive,
diffuse and more serious disease than common CHD, and the left
ventricular (LV) function can be impaired earlier. The main function of
the LV is to transport blood to all parts of the body and undertake the
blood supply to the whole body. So the effective evaluation of LV
function in patients with TVD is very meaningful to the treatment and
prognosis of patients. Traditional echocardiography has become the first
choice for clinicians to diagnose heart disease, but it is less
sensitive in early identification of cardiac function
changes[3]. The
3D-STE is a quantitative tool to evaluate LV function with high accuracy
and reliability[4].
Nesser et al.[5]found that 3D-STE in assessment of LV systolic function had a remarkable
correlation with cardiac MRI. At present, 3D-STE has been widely applied
to disease diagnosis and academic research in terms of
cardiac[6-8]. This
study used 3D-STE to quantitatively analyze the changes of systolic LV
strain parameters and evaluate LV function in patients with TVD without
myocardial infarction.