Recent progress in quantitative echocardiography

Substantial progress has been made recently in quantitating a variety of functional or morphologic parameters with echocardiography. Doppler techniques for measuring regurgitant flow rate and regurgitant orifice area in mitral and tricuspid regurgitation have become well established, along with other Doppler measures of regurgitation severity, such as proximal jet width. Doppler measurement of diastolic flow propagation in the left ventricle is emerging as a promising, albeit fascinatingly complex way of looking at diastolic function. Doppler velocimetry has been extended to wall motion, yielding color maps of tissue, an entirely new tool for assessing myocardial function and its timing. In the field of two-dimensional data processing, automatic on-line boundary detection based on integrated ultrasound backscatter has been used for volume and cardiac output calculations. Finally, three-dimensional reconstruction of cross-sectional images now has been well validated for in vivo measurements of heart cavity volumes and masses.