Deductive Echocardiographic Analysis in Infants with Congenital Heart Disease

TLDR: A step-by-step approach to cardiac diagnosis utilizing a chest X-ray and echocardiography is described and used to study a normal infant and six infant patients with angiocardiographically-proven complex congenital heart malformations.

Abstract: A step-by-step approach to cardiac diagnosis utilizing a chest X-ray and echocardiography is described and used to study a normal infant and six infant patients with angiocardiographically-proven complex congenital heart malformations The heart is divided into three major anatomical segments in order to localize the atrial and ventricular chambers and determine the relationship of the great arteries The atrial chambers are localized by noting the position of the liver on the X-ray The right atrium is on the same side as the liver with few exceptions The ventricular chambers are localized by echocardiographically identifying the tricuspid and mitral valves They are a part of the morphologically right and left ventricles, respectively As a general rule, the atrioventricular valve whose anterior leaflet is continuous with the posterior margin of a semilunar valve is the mitral valve The atrioventricular valve whose anterior leaflet is not continuous with a posterior semilunar valve margin is the tricu