Evaluation of great heart vessels and pulmonary vasculature.

This year's literature relating to imaging of the great heart vessels was devoted primarily to measurements of aortic size and to comparisons of imaging modalities in evaluating aortic aneurysms, dissections, and coarctation. The imaging modalities compared were plain chest roentgenography, conventional CT, ultrafast CT, MR imaging, transcutaneous esophageal echocardiography, and Doppler echocardiography. The pulmonary vasculature literature dealt with MR imaging of pulmonary vessels and the estimations of pulmonary pressure using echocardiography and Doppler techniques.