ArticleEchocardiography (Mount Kisco, N.Y.)2026
Novel Insights from Blood Speckle Imaging for the Assessment of Left Ventricular Flow Dynamics in Adult Patients: A Three-Patient Proof-of-Concept Case Series in the Context of Current Evidence.
Article in Echocardiography (Mount Kisco, N.Y.), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Transthoracic echocardiography is the cornerstone of cardiac imaging, yet conventional volumetric and Doppler indices may fail to detect clinically meaningful changes in ventricular performance. Patients often improve symptomatically and biochemically after device-based or medical therapies without parallel changes in standard echocardiographic measures, reflecting that the left ventricle functions not only as a pressure-volume pump but as a complex fluid-dynamic system in which myocardial mechanics and intracavitary blood flow are tightly coupled. Blood speckle imaging (BSI) tracks red blood cell speckle patterns, enabling angle-independent, contrast-free, real-time visualization and qualitative assessment of intraventricular vortex organization. We present a three-patient proof-of-concept case series including non-ischemic dilated cardiomyopathy treated with cardiac contractility modulation, ischemic cardiomyopathy managed by conduction-system pacing (CSP), and heart failure with preserved ejection fraction treated with medical optimization. BSI was performed before and after therapy and interpreted alongside a review of the intracardiac flow-dynamics literature. In all patients, symptoms and N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide levels improved despite minimal changes in left ventricular volumes and conventional systolic indices, whereas BSI revealed reorganization of intraventricular flow, characterized by fewer competing vortices, reduced late-diastolic persistence, and more physiological vortex positioning. These observations support the hypothesis that flow reorganization may represent an early marker of ventricular recovery preceding detectable structural remodeling. To our knowledge, this is among the first adult reports of therapy-associated left ventricular flow reorganization assessed by BSI across distinct heart failure phenotypes. These findings are hypothesis-generating and require prospective validation against quantitative four-dimensional flow cardiovascular magnetic resonance.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.