Although the principle of using ultrasound to measure regional myocardial function was first proposed forty years ago and there has been continuous development for the last 15 years, there is still no standardisation of methods between machines and investigators. Moreover, there is not even a common language to describe what is measured as yet.
The Guidelines Committee of the EAE has therefore initiated two projects
Firstly, a joint expert group between the European Association of Echocardiography (EAE), the Japanese Society of Echocardiography (JSE) and the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) is now preparing recommendations for standard nomenclature.
These will be circulated widely to reviewers for comment and then they may be revised, before publication and adoption by journal editors. This project will be completed by the time of the EUROECHO 2008 congress to be held in Lyon.
The members of this group are Alan Fraser, George Sutherland, and Lars-Åke Brodin (EAE), Kiyoshi Yoshida, Satoshi Nakatani, and Hirotsugu Yamada (JSE), and Allan Klein, Steven Lester, and Barry Karon (ASE). This is the first practical collaboration between these three societies, and the group plans to consult other international echocardiographic societies in order to increase the likelihood of their proposals being widely adopted.
As part of this initiative, Pio Caso and his colleagues at the Monaldi Hospital in Naples are reviewing the plethora of terms already in use, and their findings will be published electronically on the EAE website.
Secondly another group, this time composed of members of the EAE only, is preparing recommendations on technical standards and diagnostic methods.
This group includes Bart Bijnens (Barcelona), Lars-Åke Brodin (Stockholm), Pio Caso (Naples), Jan D’hooge (Leuven), Geneviève Derumeaux (Lyon), Alan Fraser (Cardiff), George Sutherland (London), Asbjørn Støylen (Trondheim) and Jens-Uwe Voigt (Leuven).
Offer your data and/or cooperation!
If you have comments or questions that you think would be useful for these groups then you can speak to any of the members or write to the Chair, Alan Fraser.
In particular, the group plans to gather data for a meta-analysis from as many healthy subjects or controls as possible, in order to produce reference ranges of normal values. If you can offer data for this collaboration, please do so.