The role of echocardiography in blunt chest trauma: a transthoracic and transesophageal echocardiographic study.

Previous studies assessing the value of transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) in blunt chest trauma are limited because patients with severe chest wall injury often have suboptimal echocardiographic findings. Transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) can provide high quality images when the transthoracic image quality is poor. To provide complete echocardiographic assessment of cardiac structure and function we prospectively performed TTE in 105 patients with severe blunt chest trauma and TEE in 20 of the 105 patients (19%) whose TTE examination results were suboptimal