Echocardiographic Assessment of the Canine Right Heart: Reference Intervals and Repeatability

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Date
2012-01-27
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Virginia Tech
Abstract

Objectives: Phase 1) Establish echocardiographic reference intervals for measurements of the normal canine right heart. Phase 2) Describe the repeatability of normal right heart echocardiographic measurements. Phase 3) Describe the repeatability of right heart echocardiographic measurements which predict pulmonary artery pressure.

Materials and Methods: Phase 1) 45 healthy adult dogs. Dogs underwent one echocardiographic examination by the same operator. Phase 2) 6 randomly selected dogs from the pool of Phase 1 dogs. Dogs underwent repeated echocardiograms by two operators. Phase 3) 4 client-owned dogs. Dogs underwent repeated echocardiographic examination by two operators.

Results: Phase 1) The linear relationship between dimension and transformed body weight was highly variable. For linear dimensions, most of the scaling exponents were close to the theoretical value of 1/3. For area measurements, most of the scaling exponents were close to 2/3. Phase 2) Of the 168 within-day, between-day and between-operator coefficients of variation (CV) generated, 154 (91.7%) were below 15% and 135 (80.4%) were less than 10%. Phase 3) Of the 100 within-day, between-day and between-operator CVs generated, 72 (72%) were below 20% and 46 (46%) were below 10%.

Conclusions: The right heart can be measured with relatively low repeatability. Measurement of the tricuspid regurgitation velocity should be the first priority when attempting to predict pulmonary artery pressure. If tricuspid regurgitation is not present, the use of transpulmonic acceleration time (AT) and the ratio of transpulmonic acceleration-to-ejection time (AT:ET) to indirectly assess pulmonary artery pressure is recommended.

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Keywords
Repeatability, Reference Intervals, Right heart, Echocardiography, Canine
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