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Focused assessment with sonography in trauma (commonly abbreviated as FAST) is a rapid bedside ultrasound examination performed by surgeons, emergency physicians, and paramedics as a screening test for blood around the heart (pericardial effusion) or abdominal organs (hemoperitoneum) after trauma.
A transthoracic echocardiogram (TTE) is the most common type of echocardiogram, which is a still or moving image of the internal parts of the heart using ultrasound.In this case, the probe (or ultrasonic transducer) is placed on the chest or abdomen of the subject to get various views of the heart.
A physician may recommend cardiac imaging to support a diagnosis of a heart condition. Medical specialty professional organizations discourage the use of routine cardiac imaging during pre-operative assessment for patients about to undergo low or mid-risk non-cardiac surgery because the procedure carries risks and is unlikely to result in the change of a patient's management. [1]
Sonographer doing an echocardiogram of a child Echocardiogram in the parasternal long-axis view, showing a measurement of the heart's left ventricle. Health societies recommend the use of echocardiography for initial diagnosis when a change in the patient's clinical status occurs and when new data from an echocardiogram would result in the physician changing the patient's care. [7]
Echocardiography uses 2D, 3D, and Doppler imaging to create pictures of the heart and visualize the blood flowing through each of the four heart valves. Echocardiography is widely used in an array of patients ranging from those experiencing symptoms, such as shortness of breath or chest pain, to those undergoing cancer treatments.
With the advances in CT technology, patients are typically able to be scanned without needing medicines by simply holding their breath during the scan. CTA is used to assess heart or vessel irregularities, location of stents and whether they are still open, and occasionally to check for atherosclerotic disease. [ 2 ]
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Initial attempts to image the heart were confounded by respiratory and cardiac motion, solved by using cardiac ECG gating, faster scan techniques and breath hold imaging. Increasingly sophisticated techniques were developed including cine imaging and techniques to characterise heart muscle as normal or abnormal (fat infiltration, oedematous ...