Clinical Applications of Echocardiography in Anaesthesia

The application of ultrasonics in clinical medicine has been directed largely towards imaging of organs involved in pathological processes for the purpose of diagnosing disease. The application in cardiology to the continuous imaging of the heart, a moving organ, has developed over the past fifteen years. Anaesthesiologists have been slow to adopt these methods despite the obvious advantages of noninvasiveness(1), mainly because the equipment has been expensive and usually located in departments of cardiology or radio-diagnosis.