Keywords
Abstract
Approximately 40,000 newborns are diagnosed with congenital heart disease (CHD) every year, and 1 in 4 of those require surgery within their first year of life.1 Current diagnostic modalities for CHD include electrocardiograms (ECG), chest X-rays, echocardiograms, cardiac CT, and cardiac MRI. Among the available diagnostic tests for CHD in fetal and pediatric patients, echocardiograms provide better spatial and temporal resolution, allowing doctors to differentiate between diseased and healthy structures of the heart. This paper covers a broad range of information about Echocardiography including the types of echocardiography, a discussion of the image quality (signal to noise ratio, temporal and spatial resolution, and imaging artifacts), and equations defining important relationships that affect echocardiography.