posted on 2019-06-07, 09:06authored byEugenia Michopoulu-Laios
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.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
1977
Notes
A Masters Dissertation, submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the award of Master of Science of Loughborough University.