[Quantitative echocardiography using a minicomputer (author's transl)].

Abstract

Echocardiography should not remain merely qualitative but every effort should be made to make it quantitative, providing the clinician with numerical values. Three items are necessary: a graphic table, a minicomputer and an electronic reprograph, all small in size. The tracings obtained in TM technique are digitalised using the graph table, and the computer provides the results in the form of listings and graphs. The latter are of two types: --some are used for the analysis of the respective chronology of the various phenomena: left ventricular diameter and its normalised derivative, apexocardiogram or carotid pulse, movement of the greater cusp of the mitral valve, thickness of the myocardium, heart sounds; --the others are used for study, with the aid of an X-Y representation in the form of loops, of variations in one phenomenon in relation to the other. Deformation of such loops makes it possible to detect poor synchronisation between 2 phenomena.