Contrast echocardiography in Canada: Canadian Cardiovascular Society/Canadian Society of Echocardiography position paper.

As an adjunct to transthoracic, transesophageal and stress echocardiography, contrast echocardiography (CE) improves the diagnostic accuracy of technically suboptimal studies when used in conjunction with harmonic imaging. Intravenous ultrasound contrast agents are indicated for left ventricular (LV) opacification and improvement of LV endocardial border delineation in patients with suboptimal acoustic windows. Demonstrated benefits of CE include improvement in the accuracy of LV measurements, regional wall motion assessment, evaluation of noncompaction cardiomyopathy, thrombus detection, Doppler signal enhancement and conjunctive use with stress echocardiography. Studies have shown the value of CE in the assessment and quantification of myocardial perfusion, and recent clinical trials have suggested a role for contrast perfusion imaging in the stratification of patients with suspected coronary artery disease. While it adds some time and cost to the echocardiographic study, CE frequently obviates the need for additional specialized, expensive and less accessible cardiac investigations, and allows for prompt and optimal subsequent patient management. Despite its proven advantages, CE is presently underused in Canada, and this situation will, unfortunately, not improve until several barriers to its use are overcome. Resolving these important hurdles is vital to the future of CE and to its eventual implementation into clinical practice of promising contrast-based diagnostic and therapeutic applications, including the assessment of perfusion by myocardial CE.