Abstract
The purpose of this study is to quantify the characterization of myocardial tissue using the method of surrogate echo data and chaos analysis. Myocardium RF ultrasonic echo signals were obtained from healthy subjects and patients with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). This surrogate method is a null hypothesis test to differentiate a deterministic process from a stochastic one using translation error. The result of the translation error from the obtained data was about half of that from the surrogate data sets. Since the obtained data showed a higher degree of determinism, we confirmed that myocardial dynamics is dominated by a deterministic process, and found that there are significant differences in deterministic values between healthy subjects and DCM patients. These results suggest that the proposed nonlinear dynamic analysis from the reconstructed echo signals is useful in myocardial tissue characterization.