Faculty Bibliography

Echocardiography is a valuable modality for imaging thrombi and vegetations. Although patients with systemic lupus erythematosus may develop Libman-Sacks endocarditis, in which punctate verrucous plaques are found histologically on valvular endocardial tissue, these lesions are ordinarily too small for ultrasonic imaging. We describe a patient with systemic lupus erythematosus complicated by systemic embolization, who had a large mobile aortic valve thrombus, which was discovered with the aid of echocardiography and was confirmed by surgical resection

MAgnetic resonance (MR) imaging was performed in 14 patients with intracavitary cardiac tumors diagnosed by echocardiography. Except in the patients whose echocardiograms were diagnostic of atrial myxomas, this modality contributed important additional anatomic information regarding the tumor's relationship to the normal intracardiac structures and/or its extension to the adjacent vascular and mediastinal structures. The MR findings correlated extremely well with the findings in all 12 patients who underwent surgical exploration or postmortem examination, and in the other two patients, MR guided the decision to obtain transvenous biopsy samples of their right heart masses

A patient developed shortness of breath 8 years after mitral valve replacement with a porcine prosthesis. Doppler echocardiography revealed left ventricular outflow tract obstruction created by a protruding prosthesis