Peeling the Heart

Peeling the Heart | 123sonography: Ultrasound is a method that employs reflected waves to form an image. The images we obtain are just a “representation” of structures in our body. The heart is not really composed of little speckles in different shades of gray. Blood flow is not truly red or blue as we see on Doppler. Structures in the body are frequently bizarre in shape, which cannot be appreciated by a cut-plane technique like ultrasound. Sometimes we are not able to see the pathology at all, but can only infer it from parameters we obtain with echo. At one of our last webinars I showed you a patient with the typical physiology and features of constrictive pericarditis. Now that the story has unfolded, I'd like to show you the true pathology behind the echo findings.