A Practical Approach to Clinical Echocardiography

Echocardiography is the most commonly used imaging technique at bedside, in OR, in outpatients and in community screening. It is highly portable, noninvasive, repeatable, inexpensive and easily accessible. When used appropriately after some experience, it has inherent internal validation unlike many other imaging modalities. Clinicians using this technique transcend boundaries of specialties. More and more physicians want to learn and practice it. Despite these obvious advantages, this modality remains incompletely utilized. There are several learning modules in capsule form and a multitude of books which claim to make a person expert in short time. In these, either there is over-simplification or meaningless convoluted and complicated equations and biophysical complexity. At fringes, are clinicians who have used this technique year after year for assessment of left ventricular function only. echocardiography represents a strange mixture of several features which have proven prime-time use and an equally numerous techniques which have yet to show clinical utility despite extensive research work spanning decades. There is an urgent need to promote that part of science which has robust validation. What clinicians require needs to be emphasized with clarity. Novices often get unnerved by the available applications on the systems which are more to stand up to the competition rather than of tangible clinical value. However, extensive research has shown applicability of a lot of echocardiographic knowledge and information in day-to-day evidence-based medicine. Quantitative and semi-quantitative protocols are gaining ground because these make serial follow-up easily. This book is an attempt to make echocardiography simple, practical and easily usable with reproducible data. Unnecessary and impractical details have been omitted.