Cardiac: Valvular function

Abstract

The most important imaging modality for evaluation of cardiac valvular disease is transesophageal and transthoracic echocardiography. It allows a comprehensive workup of the patients by detecting the presence, assessing morphological abnormalities of the valves, and grading the various diseases. This information is performed by integrating information from 2D echocardiography, color flow mapping, pulsed and continuous wave Doppler as well as quantitative Doppler flow measurements into the different semiquantitative grading schemes that are available for each valvular disease. When evaluating valvular disease with echocardiography, the general rule is also to include the assessment of associated changes in chamber or aortic root dimensions in the ventricular function analysis. Echocardiography, however, has inherent limitations because it requires exact geometric alignment of the structure of interest. In addition, it often requires repetitive measurements to minimize errors, and it depends highly on patient morphologic characteristics, instrumental settings, and transducer position. Perhaps the most important limitation is that echocardiography is strongly operator dependent. © 2008 Springer Medizin Verlag Heidelberg.