Practical Approach to a Digital Echocardiographic Laboratory

Routine digital storage of echocardiograms offers considerable advantages over video tape, including random access to images within a study, side‐by‐side comparison with prior studies, and duplication and transmission of images without degradation. The massive storage requirements for complete echo studies has discouraged many laboratories from adopting digital storage, but through judicious use of “clinical compression” routine digital echocardiography can be a reality today. By limiting storage to quad screen displays of images, it is possible to store the most relevant data from an examination in just a few megabytes.