Common ventricle is a rare congenital anomaly in which the ventricular chamber receives blood from two separate atrioventricular valves or from a common atrioventricular valve. We used contrast echocardiography during cardiac catheterization to confirm ventricular anatomy and to characterize blood flow dynamics in 35 patients with common ventricle. After injections of dye, a cloud of echoes ant...

Recent updates in the field of echocardiography have resulted in improvements in image quality, especially in those patients whose ultrasonographic (ultrasound) evaluation was previously suboptimal. Intravenous contrast agents are now available in the United States and Europe for the indication of left ventricular opacification and enhanced endocardial border delineation. The use of contrast en...

In the past thirty years echocardiography has revolutionized cardiologic investigation. The non-invasive access to anatomy, physiology, and heart diseases has become increasingly broader. Since the introduction of the M-mode technique and, progressively, of twodimensional echocardiography, Doppler, color flow mapping, transesophageal echocardiogram, and use of physical or pharmacologic stress, ...

E valuation of reversible ischaemia and understanding the physiological significance of known coronary lesions is one of the most important applications of functional cardiac testing. Myocardial perfusion abnormalities during stress are important predictors of clinical outcome and appear to be superior to the angiographic evaluation of the coronary anatomy alone. The classical ischaemic cascade...

The aim of this study is to better understand the pattern and nature of reverse redistribution (RR) in myocardial perfusion imaging. In 20 consecutive acute myocardial infarction (MI) patients, frequency of RR was correlated with that of subendocardial MI that was detected by myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE). RR was judged to be present when there was more than one grade of worsening ...

There is a complex relation between what can be seen using perfusion imaging techniques, and what can be measured.

Intramyocardial dissecting haematoma is a rare form of cardiac rupture that can occur as a complication following acute myocardial infarction or during the remodelling process. It is usually caused by a haemorrhagic dissection among the spiral myocardial fibres and needs urgent surgical treatment. Here we report the case of a 67-year-old man with indications of a previous infarction, in whom a ...

cor triatriatum is an acyanotic congenital heart disease. we present a rare case of cor triatriatum sinistrum in a 6-month-old female infant who was presented with cyanosis and failure to thrive. the 2d transthoracic echocardiography and the doppler color flow imaging showed a proximal venous chamber communicating to the distal left atrium  through restrictive opening to the low-pressure, dista...

The slope of an individual contrast trajectory on M-mode contrast echocardiography represents a physiological variable similar to that measured by Doppler echocardiography: the projection of the intracardiac velocity vector in the direction of the sound beam. To test the hypothesis that M-mode contrast echocardiography slope measurement can yield information quantitatively similar to Doppler me...

Contrast echocardiography is based on intravenous injection of microbubbles that act as blood flow tracers and increase ultra-sound signal. Contrast agents have shown to improve cardiac cavities opacification and endocardial border delineation in addition to helping perfusion evaluation. Contrast echocardiography has recently been used to evaluate cardiac masses. In this report we will describe...