The contribution of myocardial contrast echocardiography in patients with coronary heart disease

Contrast echocardiography is a new myocardial echocardiographic method that extends the capabilities of conventional echocardiography. In our first two works, we focused on determining the size of infarction in patients after AMI and compared this method with today's most commonly used diagnostic methods. We found good agreement between KEM and SPECT in the evaluation of infarction size and correlation between the extent of oscillations Q on ECG and impaired microvascular perfusion of the myocardium - or the size of infarction. In patients with chronic forms of CHD, we found that the KEM can fairly well predict the kinetics porevaskularizační improvement segments with severely impaired kinetics and in this clinical situation is comparable with Contrast-magnetic resonance imaging. In addition, low variability and low number of investigative areas nehodnotitelných infarction KEM show that it is a simple, easily reproducible and teachable method. Finally, the relatively low cost and wide availability KEM indicate great potential usefulness of this method in clinical practice