Twenty-six adult patients were studied by coimbined right and left heart catheterization to define or further to quantitate valvular defects suspected on clinical grounds. Right heart catheterization was accomplished in the usual fashion from an antecubital vein and the left heart was studied by combined transseptal left atrial and retrograde left ventricular catheterization.4 By use of these m...

Pulmonary hypertension has been associated with poor outcome after liver transplantation. We assessed the diagnostic accuracy of Doppler echocardiography in detecting significant pulmonary hypertension. Seventy-four potential liver transplant candidates underwent Doppler echocardiography in which the systolic right ventricular pressure (RVsys) was used to estimate the systolic pulmonary artery ...

Left heart catheterization in man has assumed increasing importance with the rapid advances in cardiac surgery for lesions of the left side of the heart. Zimmerman, Scott, and Becker (1950) were the first to perform left ventricular catheterization, passing a catheter in retrograde fashion from aorta to left ventricle. Subsequently the transbronchial (Facquet et al., 1952; Allison and Linden, 1...

A critical aspect of most cardiac catheterization procedures is the evaluation of myocardial function. At its simplest, this consists of a visual assessment of the left ventricular (LV) contractile pattern from the left ventriculogram, together with measurements of LV end-diastolic pressure. In laboratories where most patients have right-sided heart catheterization and cardiac output measuremen...