Coronary spasm is a constriction of the epicardial coronary arteries that produces myocardial ischemia. It is considered the main mechanism of the dynamic coronary artery stenosis. The standard method for diagnosing coronary spasm is the ergonovine test during diagnostic coronary angiography. Another test currently used is stress echocardiography with intravenous ergonovine injection. We presen...

BACKGROUD The high service burden for acute admissions and referrals via rapid access chest pain clinics for evaluation of possible coronary artery disease means that many patients are now undergoing an investigation such as stress echocardiography as part of their evaluation. We aimed to see if the reassurance provided by negative stress echocardiography correlates with long-term event free su...

Thank you for your comment. Indeed stress echocardiography is a promising tool for the evaluation of the phenomenon of exercise-induced pulmonary hypertension (PH). However, as you already mentioned, cut-off values and influence of other factors such as age and standardisation of exercise protocols are lacking and the predictive role of PH at exercise is not well understood. For these reasons t...

Currently, a transthoracic echocardiographic examination is routinely included in the assessment of the majority of patients with cardiac disease. Other examinations are also demanded every day from the echocardiography laboratory. Of these, stress echocardiography is particularly time consuming. Shortening the time of infusion of a drug would increase the feasibility and the cost effectiveness...

Real-time three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging has been proposed as an alternative for two-dimensional stress echocardiography for assessing myocardial dysfunction and underlying coronary artery disease. Analysis of 3D stress echocardiography is no simple task and requires considerable expertise. In this paper, we propose methods for automated analysis, which may provide a more objective a...