Many indices have been proposed to describee the diastolic pressure-volume curve mathematically and permit quantification of the elastic properties of the myocardium itself in hopes that changes in the muscle caused by disease would b.e reflected in the diastolic pressure-volume curve. To date, none of the proposed indices has been shown convincingly to discriminate one group of patients from another. While this situation in part arises from the relatively large amount of noise introduced by the technical difficulties of measuring synchronous pressures and volumes during diastole in man, ther is a more fundamental difficulty. In practice, one can measure only a short segment of the entire pressure-volume curve, and the values of all diastolic pressure-volume curve parameters investigated change significantly when one uses different segments of the same pressure-volume curve to compute them. These results were derived from relatively noise-free pressure-volume curves obtained by filling nine excised dog left ventricles at a known rate and monitoring pressure-volume curve used to compute the parameter. Merely increasing measurement fidelity will not resolve this problem, because none of these parameters accurately characterizes the entire diastolic pressure-volume curbe from a segment like that which one can reasonably expect to obtain from humans.