Echocardiographic determination of right ventricular function

Abstract

With advances in surgical technique, more children with complex congenital heart disease are surviving.1 Increasingly, attention is focusing on late morbidities, such as right ventricular dysfunction.2 For many common forms of congenital cardiac malformations, the assessment of right ventricular size and function is now essential so as to make optimal decisions concerning management.3 Commonly encountered examples include the timing for operative replacement of the incompetent pulmonary valve following surgical repair of tetralogy of Fallot, and the assessment of suspected ventricular dysfunction in children with functionally single or systemic right ventricles.4 Echocardiography remains the most practical method for serially determining right ventricular function, despite its limitations.5 The easy accessibility of echocardiography has encouraged its continued development as a tool for determining right ventricular function in neonates, infants, and children. A comparison of values established for the right ventricle is shown in Table 1, along with the references from which they were culled. We will describe these values in sequence.