A comparison of radiological and echocardiographic estimates of cardiac parameters

This thesis attempts to identify the agreement of radiological and echocardiographic techniques in assessing cardiac parameters. In contrast to previous investigations everyday clinical data from the records of patients attending a cardiac clinic were used, instead of performing the examined techniques on a chosen sample of subjects. The radiological techniques, radiography and angiocardiography are more traditional, whereas echocardiography is a new tool, which according to previous research is very accurate for establishing a pre-operative diagnosis; and in some instances it can replace more sophisticated techniques such as angiocardiography. This work is focussed on the relative role of three of the above mentioned techniques as they are applied to everyday clinical practice for estimating cardiac parameters. The first part of the study consists of the examination of cardiac parameters assessed by radiography and echocardiography on a sample of 53 male and female patients aged between 18 and 73 years. The inter-comparisons reveal low order coefficients of correlation. The second part of the study investigates which technique is of significant diagnostic value when compared to angiocardiography on a sample of 58 male and female patients, aged between 17 and 66 years. Angiocardiography is widely recognised as an accurate and objective technique for measuring cardiac parameters. Surprisingly, none of the inter-comparisons showed the high correlations found by previous researchers. It was also observed that the correlation coefficients were consistently higher for the male patients when compared to the females. In the third part of the study the inter-observer agreement between Specialists is examined. Significant differences were found between them when they measured identical cardiac parameters using the same technique for radiography and echocardiography, as well as discrepancies in the resultant diagnosis. At present no single technique is significantly powerful to enable it to be used on its own and for the time being it is recommended that radiographic and echocardiographic techniques should be used in conjunction with one another.