Usefulness of quantitative echocardiography in congestive heart failure.
Echocardiography provides a harmless method which is of value in the assessment of the left ventricle in patients with congestive heart failure particularly when the patient is used as his own control. There are some obvious limitations. Considerable experience is needed in the proper application while adequate echocardiograms may not be obtained in all patients. Agreement in individual patients with other methods such as cine-angiocardiography or radionuclide ventriculography is limited. Whether this is inherent in the echocardiographic method or in the other commonly used methods is unclear since no in vivo 'golden standard' is available for comparison.
D000790:Angiocardiography; D002302:Cardiac Output; D002306:Cardiac Volume; D002932:Cineangiography; D004452:Echocardiography / Q000379:methods*; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006333:Heart Failure / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology; D006352:Heart Ventricles / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans; D011877:Radionuclide Imaging