Echocardiography

Rating:
Summary: Very Good book on all aspects of Echocardiography
Review: If you are looking for a good overall book on all aspects of Echocardiography this is a good book at a fair price. This book, however, is geared toward the echocardiographic professional and would be very difficult for the layman to comprehend.

Rating:
Summary: a towering text on adult echocardiography
Review: this is a comprehensive text aimed at the cardiologist. all aspects of echo is covered. initial portion of book is devoted to man and machine. successive chapters cover various diseases like vulvular, ischaemic, cardiomyopathy etc in detail. easier to understand concise forms are found in harrison's textbook of medicine and in braunwald diseases of heart. the book has a large number of pictures and doppler tracings. hemodynamics are covered in length , although pisa is not. new edition is eagerly awaited.

Rating:
Summary: Great echo book but...
Review: When I was a young man, I read the last edition of this book and I fell in love with Cardiology. Every word in the last edition was memorized, just like a love letter. Now I am an old man, and I was delighted to see a new edition of this book finally published. I spent one weekend digesting every word. While I found the book highly delightful to read, I am finding factual errors in the book, to my disappointment. For example, in chapter 6, page 172, figure 6.51, deceleration time of mitral inflow was drawn incorrectly (it should start from the peak of the E wave, not from the beginning of the E). Then in chapter 16, page 513, the book stated that in dobutamine echo, a hypokinetic area that exhibits "sustained improvement" rather than "bipashic response" should be read as non-viable. But in echo literature (Heart. 2001 Dec;86(6):672-8 and Am J Cardiol. 1999 Jul 15;84(2):130-4), "sustained improvement" is considered viable.

The book is great for beginner and intermediate level user. I still love my Feigenbaum, but I found a new love: Catherine Otto's $300 thick book (Principle of Clinical Echocardiography).