Echocardiographic imaging in coronary artery disease: new techniques

When analyzing left ventricular wall motion and thickening, two-dimensional echocardiography (2DE) represents a useful non-invasive tool for diagnosing and stratifying ischemic heart disease. New important technical advancements, such as harmonic imaging, allow to overcome limitations due to poor echocardiographic image quality in a large proportion of patients. Combination of exercise or pharmacological stress test with on-line echo images monitoring expands 2DE diagnostic and prognostic value in both ischemia or viability assessment. Study of contrast agents distribution is very promising for clarifying the complex interaction between myocardial perfusion and functional correlates, including myocardial stunning, hibernation and no-reflow phenomena. Direct visualization of epicardial coronary arteries and assessment of coronary artery blood flow has recently been demonstrated to be possible by either transthoracic (TTE) or transesophageal echocardiography (TEE). Acoustic quantification (AQ), automatic border detection (ABD), tissue Doppler imaging (TDI), and color kinesis are other technical modalities which may result to be useful for clinical evaluation of patients with either acute or chronic coronary syndromes.