Patent ID: 6885889

Claim:
A method for assessing left ventricular function and optimizing cardiac pacing intervals in a device programmed to operate a bi-ventricular cardiac pacing modality, comprising: disposing a transducer that is adapted to directly sense movement of a portion of a left ventricular chamber of a heart and providing a signal related to the movement; coupling said signal to a means for detecting the movement; iteratively adjusting an interventricular (V—V) timing parameter of a first pacing electrode in electrical communication with one ventricle relative to a second pacing electrode in electrical communication with the other ventricle over a range of temporal values; for each of at least two of the interventricular (V—V) timing parameters, storing the interventricular (V—V) timing parameter and the peak amplitude value corresponding to a first peak of the signal obtained during an isovolumetric contraction portion of a cardiac cycle; comparing the magnitude of the stored peak amplitude values; and programming an optimized interventricular (V—V) interval using the interventricular (V—V) timing parameter corresponding to the highest stored peak amplitude value.