Cardiovascular Multimodality Imaging: It is Time to Get on Board! A “Società Italiana di Ecocardiografia e CardioVascular Imaging” Statement

IntroductIon Along with the growth of patients at cardiovascular risk, a new wave is hitting the world of health care. Over the recent decade, noninvasive and invasive imaging technologies have been protagonists of a dramatic evolution. This process, as a Tsunami, may overwhelm the way the physicians were used to work until now [Figure 1]. The greater availability and reliability of current imaging modalities to reveal the details of various cardiac structures and pathophysiology has made the evaluation of cardiovascular disease multimodal. Hence, along with traditional imaging modalities, such as single photon computed emission tomography (SPECT) or tissue Doppler imaging and two-dimensional echocardiography (2DE), new technologies emerge in the scene such as deformation/ speckle tracking imaging (strain and strain rate) and three-dimensional echocardiography (3DE); miniaturized or handheld cardiovascular ultrasound machine; positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT), and cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) as well as the combination of them, resulting in the so-called “fusion imaging.”