Study limitations
Our study must be interpreted within the context of its potential limitations. Possible inter-vendor and inter-software differences were not investigated, nor were the impact of the operator’s experience level on echocardiographic feasibility, time-consumption and reproducibility. Furthermore, traditional parameters for assessment of diastolic function are influenced by biological variation, and we sought to minimize these by repeating the study over a short time, so that main source of variation was imaging per se . Feasibility of TR Vmax might be higher if other projections were attempted. The majority of the patients were in sinus rhythm, which limits the generalizability of our findings to patients with arrhythmias. Our cohort were also old and overweight with suboptimal image quality. Reproducibility may be higher and time-consumption lower in a broader patient population.