With the support of the EACVI’s Research & Innovation Committee, the EACVI’s young community, the Heart Imagers of Tomorrow (HIT) Committee have conducted their first multicentre study, the Multicentric Atrial Strain COmparison between Two different modalities (MASCOT HIT) study.

“Even before we present our results,” says Dr. Cameli, “we can conclude that the MASCOT HIT study has been a success. The enthusiasm and engagement of HIT members has led to a really exciting collaboration.”The aim of the MASCOT HIT study was to define which of the two methods available for the analysis of left atrial (LA) strain by speckle-tracking echocardiography is the most reproducible, feasible and least time consuming in order to provide a common standard method. The first method, peak atrial longitudinal strain (PALS), uses QRS as the starting point to assess LA reservoir function, whereas the P wave is the starting point of the second method, total epsilon.

HIT Ambassadors and HIT members were invited to recruit three groups of participants: healthy controls, patients with LA pressure overload (e.g. aortic stenosis, arterial hypertension) and patients with LA pressure-volume overload (e.g. mitral regurgitation, heart failure). Two independent echocardiographers analysed LA strain using both the PALS and total epsilon methods for each subject. It was prespecified that one observer was a HIT member and the other, a senior imager.

The primary endpoint was the difference in the inter-correlation coefficient obtained by the two observers for the two techniques. Secondary endpoints were the feasibility and execution time of the two methods. The performance of the young and senior imagers was also compared.

“It is an amazing achievement that over the 4-month data collection period, we were able to assess 897 subjects in 22 expert centres,” says Dr. Cameli. “As you will see tomorrow, the MASCOT HIT study has revealed some important findings about the two methods and about the scientific accuracy of our young and senior observers. Given this success, we are already working on our next largescale HIT study.”

This article is a news release from EuroEcho 2019 Congress Meeting. Read the original here.