The echocardiograms analyzed were acquired before CRT from 26 patients who have received CRT. Sequential forward selection was performed on the parameters obtained by peak-strain timing and phase space reconstruction on speckle-tracking radial strain to find an optimal set of features for creating intelligent classifiers. Support vector machine (SVM) with a linear, quadratic, and polynominal kernel were tested to build classifiers to identify potential responders and non-responders for CRT by selected features.
Based on random sub-sampling validation, the best classification performance is correct rate about 95%with 96-97%sensitivity and 93-94%specificity achieved by applying SVM with a quadratic kernel on a set of 3 parameters. The selected 3 parameters contain both indexes extracted by peak-strain timing and phase space reconstruction.
An intelligent classifier with an averaged correct rate, sensitivity and specificity above 90%for assisting in identifying CRT responders is built by speckle-tracking radial strain. The classifier can be applied to provide objective suggestion for patient selection of CRT.