INTRODUCTION
Coronary artery disease(CAD) is a major public health problem. It is the
leading cause of all deaths (1,2) and thus early diagnosis and treatment
of CAD is of critical importance. To diagnose the CAD in patients
presenting with chest pain is sometimes costly and time consuming.
Numerous clinical studies have been conducted for the early diagnosis of
CAD (3-7). Currently there are various available invasive and
noninvasive tests, however all of them have several limitations. Some
are expensive and difficult to access, while some others have a high
dose of radiation. Due to all these reasons, there is an absolute need
for a reliable and cost effective non-invasive imaging method. Speckle
tracking echocardiography (STE) is a new cardiac ultrasound technique
that allows to assess LV function semi automatically, with a simplified
operational process and high reproducibility. Furthermore, STE has been
demonstrated to be superior to conventional echocardiographic methods to
evaluate cardiac functions and predict cardiovascular outcomes as well
(8,9). Another advantageous feature of STE is it’s low intra-and
inter-observer variability. Being independent from angle and index makes
it more useful too and thus, with all those positive aspects it may
become the optimal method for global LV systolic function evaluation
(10). Peak Longitudinal strain (PLS) and post systolic shortening (PSS)
have been shown to detect resting ischemia in the literature (11-15). In
our study, we aimed to evaluate the rest ischemia with STE and compare
it with the two methods in patients who were scheduled coronary
angiography according to the stress tests .