The 50th Anniversary o Are We at the Daw

ow nloaded from pathophysiologic and diagnostic concepts. As a con-sequence, it opened new horizons for clinical research and made unique contributions to our understanding of cardiac disease. With the increasing imaging performance, the number of functions and Doppler assessment of hemodynamics, all of which can be applied in a wide variety of clinical scenarios, it has become the most widely disseminated cardiac imag-ing technology. Currently, more than one out of The echocardiography laboratory can therefore ap-propriately be called ‘the non-invasive imaging and hemodynamic laboratory’. The impact on our di-agnostic capabilities has been enormous and the practice of cardiology has been changed permanently. In day-to-day cardiological practice, ultrasound im-aging andDoppler assessment are now the first cardiac examinationwhenever cardiac disease is suspected and a definitive diagnosis is often made at a relatively low cost when compared to cardiac catheterisation andVIEW