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 .