Angiocardiography: Its Development, Technic, and Findings, and Role in Surgical Heart Disease

¹ Mount Sinai Hospital and Clinic, Los Angeles.

Angiocardiography, a method of contrast visualization of the heart, lungs and great vessel, has its greatest value in the diagnosis of congenital heart anomalies. It is helpful in the delineation of the defects present, and with cardiac catheterization, supplements the conventional methods of examination. It is applicable to a considerable number of the problems seen in practice, and to most of the cases coming to surgical correction. It has contributed greatly to understanding of these problems and it has improved and modified our conventional methods of study by the knowledge gained through its use.

Its application to acquired heart disease is somewhat more limited and it finds its greatest usefulness in problems which resist solution by conventional means, and in which its particular ability to delineate certain structures is of great value, such as aneurysm, aortic disease, pericardial disease and occult heart failure. It is also valuable in evaluating mitral valve disease.

The present trend in the development of equipment is toward high speed serial radiography with the ability to make from two to 12 exposures per second, and also toward cineradiographic devices capable of up to 32 frames per second. These high speed serial technics will undoubtedly extend the field of usefulness of this method, and will amplify our current knowledge.