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Tsui-Lieh Hsu, MD
Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taiwan

Echocardiography is currently the most widely used and cost-effective diagnostic imaging tool in cardiology. In the new 21 century, miniaturization and digital technology have build-up high resolution, battery-powered hand-carried ultrasound (HCU) imaging devices with excellent two-dimensional and color blood flow imaging capabilities.

During this period, a varied of HCU products (SonoHeartTM, iLook?, Acuson Cypress, Terason, OptiGoTM, LOGIQ Book XPTM) have been introduced into the market with a different size, weight, configuration and capabilities. The major advantages of HCU allows to carrying the ultrasound device in the bedside for “quick look” of patient's heart condition such as cardiac chamber size, regional and global ventricular function, and identifying the origin of cardiac murmur. This kind of examinations are particularly useful in the ER, CCU and POR clinical settings for helping the clinician to make a right decision for choosing an appropriate diagnostic step-up and life-saving therapeutic procedures.

However, the drawbacks of current HCU devices are still cumbersome, heavy and not easy to move around in the busy clinics and service wards. It is still not good enough to totally replace the conventional stethoscopes.

What will be the ultimate ultrasound stethoscope's design and function looks like? Personally, I think we could adopt from a successful innovated electronic devices; such as i-Apple series as a business model into our cardiac ultrasound tool development. Basically, the clinician needs not only see the picture of the heart, also listened the heart sounds. Therefore, this ultrasound tool provides both audio- and video information which will enforce the clinician for performing better of patient's care. Most importantly, the size of the tool should be pocket in size and light-weighted. In the future, in conjunction with 3C technology, we will able to transmit the bedside information to the remote site for consultation, education or resources center for the hospital data management. This will be a new frontier of ultrasound technology in the modern era of cardiology.