Transesophageal Echocardiography — Sound Diagnostic Technique or Two-Edged Sword?

Over the past 30 years, cardiac ultrasound examinations have been used in an ever-increasing number of clinical applications. Echocardiography currently has important uses in a range of disorders, including valvular, ischemic, myocardial, pericardial, congenital, infectious, and neoplastic diseases.1 To an important extent, this development has been made possible by a sequence of new diagnostic methods arising from technological innovations. From early time—motion studies, echocardiography now has evolved to include two-dimensional imaging, spectral Doppler measurement of blood-flow velocity with pulsed-wave and continuous-wave techniques, color Doppler flow imaging, contrast echocardiography, and stress echocardiography. The latest method is transesophageal echocardiography.In simple terms, . . .