Assessment of left ventricular diastolic function in the critically ill patient remains a difficult issue in clinical practice. Combined use of routine transmitral and pulmonary venous Doppler patterns in conjunction with tissue Doppler imaging have been claimed to allow bedside diagnosis of diastolic dysfunction. Although in the previous issue of Critical Care it was clearly demonstrated there...

Echocardiography is a well-established clinical tool for the assessment of myocardial function. However, in subclinical diseases, the routinely used echocardiographic parameters such as left ventricular (LV) ejection fraction (EF) and fractional shortening are not sensitive enough to detect myocardial dysfunction. We have learned over the past years that other echocardiographic techniques such ...

Ultrasonic colour Doppler is an imaging technique that combines anatomical information derived using ultrasonic pulse-echo techniques with velocity information derived using ultrasonic Doppler techniques to generate colour-coded maps of tissue velocity superimposed on grey-scale images of tissue anatomy. The most common use of the technique is to image the movement of blood through the heart, a...