ACC/AHA/ASE 2003 Guideline Update for the Clinical Application of Echocardiography: summary article. A report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force on Practice Guidelines (ACC/AHA/ASE Committee to Update the 1997 Guidelines for the Clinical Application of Echoca

The previous guideline for the use of echocardiography was published in March 1997. Since that time, there have been significant advances in the technology of echocardiography and growth in its clinical use and in the scientific evidence leading to recommendations for its proper use. Each section has been reviewed and updated in evidence tables, and where appropriate, changes have been made in recommendations. A new section on the use of intraoperative transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) is being added to update the guidelines published by the American Society of Anesthesiologists and the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists. There are extensive revisions, especially of the sections on ischemic heart disease; congestive heart failure, cardiomyopathy, and assessment of left ventricular (LV) function; and screening and echocardiography in the critically ill. There are new tables of evidence and extensive revisions in the ischemic heart disease evidence tables. Because of space limitations, only those sections and evidence tables with new recommendations will be printed in this summary article. Where there are minimal changes in a recommendation grouping, such as a change from Class IIa to Class I, only that change will be printed, not the entire set of recommendations. Advances for which the clinical applications are still being investigated, such as the use of myocardial contrast agents and three-dimensional echocardiography, will not be discussed. The original recommendations of the 1997 guideline are based on a Medline search of the English literature from 1990 to May 1995. The original search yielded more than 3000 references, which the committee reviewed. For this guideline update, literature searching was conducted in Medline, EMBASE, Best Evidence, and the Cochrane Library for English-language meta-analyses and systematic reviews from 1995 through September 2001. Further searching was conducted for new clinical trials on the following topics: echocardiography in adult congenital heart disease, echocardiography for evaluation …