الفهرس 
Chapter 1: Acute Pulmonary EmbolismOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
This is a case-control study conducted on 31 PE patients and 31 controls of matched age and sex. Echocardiography was done for both groups to assess the sensitivity of conventional parameters for RV function in diagnosis of PE and compare them to speckle tracking, with the reference being CTPA, the gold standard for diagnosis of PE. We excluded in our study any condition which may bias the results, such as any pulmonary or valvular heart disease which may affect the right side of the heart. Also we excluded patients with history of previous PE. The results showed FAC to be the most sensitive conventional parameter, with a sensitivity of 61.3 %, followed by RVOT SE, with a sensitivity of 58.1 %. However, of all the echocardiographic parameters, RV FWS, at a cut-off value of -19%, was the most sensitive, with a sensitivity of 67.7 % and with AUC of 0.934. Moreover, the combined sensitivity of speckle tracking and conventional RV assessment parameters was 74.2%. We concluded from our study that echocardiography can be used as a useful point-of-care tool in diagnosis of PE and in guiding therapy especially in centers lacking CT devices and in certain populations in whom the use of contrast or radiology is not feasible, such as CKD patients, pregnant patients and patients with allergy to contrast We also concluded that the addition of RV FWS to traditional echocardiographic indices of RV function much improves the sensitivity of echocardiography in diagnosis of PE.
The main limitation of this study is the relatively small size of the studied groups, so the findings concluded from our study need to be further investigated in larger multi-center studies.