Assessment of systolic function in small animal cardiology: is it acceptable to eyeball it?
Conventional teaching in veterinary cardiology tends to put the emphasis on objective, technical methods of assessing systolic function requiring considerable skill: primarily left ventricular ejection fraction by Simpson method of discs (SMOD) and fractional shortening. However, intra- and inter-observer variation is considerable and I worry that even quite experienced sonographers place reliance on numbers which, … Continue reading