Interventional echocardiography in structural heart disease.

Overview

Over the past decade, catheter based treatments of an increasing variety of cardiac diseases have expanded dramatically. These advancements became available through new developments and improvements in available devices, as well as increasing expertise of operators. However, arguably it is the innovation and progress in imaging techniques, and in particular in echocardiography, that allowed for such a surge in available percutaneous procedures. In this paper, current echocardiographic techniques, imaging protocols and recommendations will be reviewed and clinical examples will be shown to illustrate the use and importance of echocardiographic imaging in catheter based procedures for structural heart disease.