Pulmonary Artery Acceleration Time Provides an Accurate Estimate of Systolic Pulmonary Arterial Pressure during Transthoracic Echocardiography

PAAT is routinely obtainable and correlates strongly with both TRVmax and EPSPAP in a large population of randomly selected patients undergoing transthoracic echocardiography. Characterization of the relationship between PAAT and EPSPAP permits PAAT to be used to estimate peak systolic pulmonary artery pressure independent of TR, thereby increasing the percentage of patients in whom transthoracic echocardiography can be used to quantify pulmonary artery pressure.