Evaluation of Myocardial Perfusion by Means of Contrast Echocardiography

Abstract

In 1980 DeMaria [4] reported that injection of an ultrasonic contrast medium in the left ventricle or the aorta causes an increase in echo intensity in the myocardium. He speculated that this observation might suggest a possibility of evaluating myocardial perfusion. Since this first report a number of experiments in laboratory animals have been performed with a variety of different ultrasonic contrast media. These studies have shown that reproducible demonstration of a myocardial perfusion defect is possible after total occlusion of a coronary vessel [2,9–12,22,24,27]. Attempts have been made to correlate the kinetics of the myocardial contrast effect with actual myocardial blood flow [13,17,25,28,29]. Myocardial contrast echocardiography is currently an interesting experimental method for evaluation of myocardial ischemia. Initial clinical studies have proven that the technique is well tolerated, and it is to be expected that myocardial contrast echocardiography will be performed in humans in the future [16, 20, 23].