J.R. Roelandt Livres

Why a book on contrast echocardiography? Over the past dozen years enough experience has accumulated to warrant a more extensive treatment of this method. Furthermore, there are new developments that suggest increased clinical utility for contrast echocardiography in the future. This book aims to summarize the "state of the art" for those interested in echocardiography - presumably mainly cardiologists, but here and there those of a more technical bent will find useful information as well. We feel that a more basic understanding of microbubble dynamics is necessary to advance research for such applications as transmission through the lungs, videodensitometric quantitation of cardiac output, intracardiac shunts, etc. All of these topics are extensively dealt with. The reader will note that many of the clinical chapters are written by pediatric cardiologists. This is only natural, since shunt detection and analysis of flow relationships are relatively more important in congenital heart diseases, and cur­ rently represent the most important uses for contrast echo cardiography in day-to­ day practice.

The introduction of intravascular ultrasound has attracted considerable interest because it yields high-resolution images not only of the vessel lumen but also of the vessel wall and its pathology. The first edition of this book, published in 1989, was mainly dedicated to technical approaches and in vitro studies. Now more clinical experience has been gained, including knowledge on coronary arteries. This second edition provides the reader with a concise overview of all information obtained during the last two years, together with the opinions of acknowledged experts in this field.

Intracoronary ultrasound is a rapidly evolving imaging modality and the increasing number of published studies indicates that the technique is safe and provides incremental and more detailed diagnostic information than coronary angiography.The technique has the potential to study the pathobiology of atherosclerosis, to clarify the significance of angiographically equivocal lesions and has helped us to understand the mechanisms, effects and complications of catheter-based revascularization procedures. Combinations of imaging and therapeutic devices are being developed for both guidance and assessment of the revascularization procedure. Three-dimensional reconstruction of coronary segments is now possible in real time and provides the opertor with more detailed information on coronary pathology. In this monograph, leading experts in the field present the state of the art of all these new developments.