Hi mcgrew2-ga, and thanks for your question.
An article by Meyer gives an excellent discussion of the history of
echocardiography. Here is a relevant excerpt, discussing the first
echocardiogram:
"In the early 1950s, Inge Edler, a cardiologist at Lund University in
Sweden, and Hellmuth Hertz, a Swedish physicist, borrowed a sonar
device (Figure 1) from a local shipyard, modified it, and recorded
echoes from Hertz?s own heart (Figure 2).[3] With the development of
this ultrasonic "reflectoscope," the new field of echocardiography had
its beginnings.[4?6] A succinct review of the work of these 2 pioneers
in echocardiography can be found in the "Profiles in Cardiology"
published in Clinical Cardiology in April 2002.[7] In the latter part
of the 1950s, Effert and Domanig[8] identified left atrial masses
using echocardiography."
Meyer RA. History of ultrasound in cardiology. J Ultrasound Med.
2004 Jan;23(1):1-11.
PMID: 14756347
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=14756347&query_hl=17
The article is not available online, but you can either purchase a
copy from link on the site above if required. You could also likely
find it at an academic or medical library.
With regards to MUGA (gated blood pool scans), an article from the
Medical Physics e-Mail Newsletter describes the early days:
"Major advances in instrumentation design and electronics in the early
1960â??s led to an improved technical capability to assess
cardiovascular performance. It was during this time period that Anger,
Gottschalk and associates published the first dynamic images of the
heart using a prototype single crystal camera. The MUGA scan or
Multigated Acquisition Study (try explaining this acronym to a
patient) or gated cardiac blood pool imaging or RNA radionuclide
ventriculography was the first heart imaging routinely performed in
Nuclear Medicine. The MUGA proved to be the gold standard for its
reproducibility in calculating ejection fraction."
Maria Mackin. Medical Health Physics e-Mail Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 3, Sept., 2000.
This article is no longer available online, except through the Google
cache (and possibly the way-back machine):
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=cache:B_CUJhurmJEJ:hps.org/mhps/files/medhpev03n03.pdf+muga+gated+blood+pool+historical+cardiac+history+first
So, the short answer is that echocardiograms were first performed in
the 1950's, while the first MUGA was performed in the early 1960's.
I hope this information was useful. Please feel free to request clarification.
-welte-ga |
