An echocardiogram is an ultrasound of the heart, much like the ultrasounds we do on babies in a mother’s uterus. We rub a wand over the chest wall and obtain images of the heart muscle. We can see all the individual chambers and the valves and how they are working.
Echocardiogram is very useful in determining the reason behind many symptoms such as shortness of breath, chest pain, arrythmias, blood clots or heart palpitations.
We then perform three-dimensional reconstruction of the image and get a more detailed review of how the blood flow is distributing within the heart chambers, and how the valves are functioning. It is as if we are able to take the heart out of the body and look at it from inside the individual chambers to see how the valves and pumping chambers are functioning.
