Conventional echocardiography is widely used and well documented in evaluation of patients with stable and unstable coronary artery disease (Mollema et al., 2009). In particular, assessment of left ventricular function, volumes and ejection fraction adds important prognostic information in individual patients. In addition, echocardiography may detect any concomitant valvular heart disease as we...

Myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE) allows the assessment of myocardial perfusion by imaging the coronary microcirculation. The development of new contrast agents and new diagnostic tools far assessing myocardial perfusion by means of MCE has led to a new field of applications far patients suffering from ischemic heart disease. Several studies have shown that MCE is a feasible and accura...

Recent updates in the field of echocardiography have resulted in improvements in both image quality and techniques allowing echocardiography to maintain it's position as the primary non-invasive imaging modality. In particular, the development of new ultrasound contrast agents and imaging techniques have now made possible the assessment of myocardial perfusion. Myocardial contrast echocardiogra...

Hypertension is associated with atherosclerosis and cardiac and vascular structural and functional changes. Myocardial ischemia may arise in hypertension independent of coronary artery disease through an interaction between several pathophysiological mechanisms, including left ventricular hypertrophy, increased arterial stiffness and reduced coronary flow reserve associated with microvascular d...

This article is one of ten reviews selected from the Annual Update in Intensive Care and Emergency medicine 2016. Other selected articles can be found online at http://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/annualupdate2016. Further information about the Annual Update in Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine is available from http://www.springer.com/series/8901.

To compare the results of transthoracic contrast echocardiography (TTCE) adding a grading scale with the results of thoracic computed tomography (CT) in order to optimise the use of both techniques. 95 patients with hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT) were examined with TTCE and thoracic CT to detect pulmonary arteriovenous malformations (PAVMs). According to previous studies, TTCE was...

In 1997, I wrote an invited review on myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE) entitled “Myocardial Contrast Echocardiography: 15 Years of Research and Development” in the From-Bench-to-Bedside section of Circulation.1 Then, in 2003, Hiroshi Ito and I wrote a 2-piece invited review entitled “Microvasculature in Acute Myocardial Ischemia: Evolving Concepts in Pathophysiology, Diagnosis, and Tr...

Sixty-two subjects underwent M-mode and two-dimensional echocardiographic studies that included imaging of the inferior vena cava (IVC) during upper extremity contrast injections. Group 1 consisted of 10 patients with clinical tricuspid regurgitation (TR). Group 2 consisted of 40 patients without definite clinical signs of TR but with conditions known to be commonly associated with TR (e.g., mi...

E chocardiography has been criticised of having only moderate reproducibility and of having a low sensitivity of changes in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF). Inadequate endocardial visualisation during echocardiography occurs in up to 20% of cases. Although image quality has been improved with the introduction of harmonic imaging, 2 there are still a number of studies remaining of inad...

UNLABELLED The assessment of regional ventricular function is dependent on good endocardial definition. Suboptimal images can be converted to diagnostic recordings in the majority of patients by contrast agents, which have become an indispensable aid in rest and stress echocardiography. In particular for stress echocardiography image quality is essential and contrast administration is of great ...