Diagnostic accuracy of stress-echocardiography for the detection of significant coronary artery disease

Abstract

Stress-echocardiography has been used for the detection of ischemia for more than a decade and was first reported to be a clinically feasible technique by Wann et al. [1]. Since then stress-echocardiography has become an increasingly popular non-invasive alternative method for the detection of coronary artery disease, which has a number of medical and economical advantages. A variety of stress modes has been applied to patients with suspected coronary artery disease to induce new wall motion abnormalities or to intensify preexisting wall motion abnormalities in the perfusion territory of a stenosed vessel. These wall motion abnormalities can be identified by 2D-echocardiography [2] and in experienced hands wall motion analysis based on stress-echocardiography has proved to be as sensitive and specific for the detection of coronary artery disease as myocardial scintigraphy [3, 4]. Moreover, stress echocardiography may be valuable to evaluate the functional relevance of coronary artery stenoses in patients with known coronary artery disease, which is often not reliably predicted by coronary angiography [5, 6].