Practical Guide to Fetal Echocardiography

From The Critics

Reviewer: Catherine J. Babcock, MD, FRCP(C)(University of Utah School of Medicine)
Description: This succinct, well-referenced guide to fetal echocardiography is an excellent overview of the complex topic of the fetal cardiac evaluation.
Purpose: The purpose of the book is to provide practitioners with a practical guide to examining the fetal heart to improve their echocardiographic skills. The need for a guide like this is enormous because it distills a large body of complex information into a readable, concise narrative that is eminently understandable. The book has 11 chapters, each building on the previous chapter and progressing in complexity.
Audience: The author has extensive training and experience in the field of fetal echocardiography. The audience that will benefit from his book is broad, extending from the resident to the specialist fetal sonologist.
Features: The author makes excellent use of side-by-side schematics and sonograms to illustrate concepts. Multiple tables and figures adeptly replace wordy text, allowing the chapters to be short but comprehensive. An extensive and current bibliography follows each chapter for those wishing more in-depth reading. Despite the fact that this book covers an impressive amount of information, it is less than 120 pages in length, attesting to the author's unique ability to resist nonessential data.
Assessment: I recommend this book to anyone learning or performing prenatal sonography. The author should be commended for his success at providing a practical approach to the fetal cardiac examination and making a sometimes forbidding body of information unintimidating.

Catherine J. Babcock

This succinct, well-referenced guide to fetal echocardiography is an excellent overview of the complex topic of the fetal cardiac evaluation. The purpose of the book is to provide practitioners with a practical guide to examining the fetal heart to improve their echocardiographic skills. The need for a guide like this is enormous because it distills a large body of complex information into a readable, concise narrative that is eminently understandable. The book has 11 chapters, each building on the previous chapter and progressing in complexity. The author has extensive training and experience in the field of fetal echocardiography. The audience that will benefit from his book is broad, extending from the resident to the specialist fetal sonologist. The author makes excellent use of side-by-side schematics and sonograms to illustrate concepts. Multiple tables and figures adeptly replace wordy text, allowing the chapters to be short but comprehensive. An extensive and current bibliography follows each chapter for those wishing more in-depth reading. Despite the fact that this book covers an impressive amount of information, it is less than 120 pages in length, attesting to the author's unique ability to resist nonessential data. I recommend this book to anyone learning or performing prenatal sonography. The author should be commended for his success at providing a practical approach to the fetal cardiac examination and making a sometimes forbidding body of information unintimidating.

Booknews

A guide to evaluating the fetal heart written for ultrasound practitioners in a concise but thorough narrative. Abuhamad (obstetrics and gynecology, Eastern Virginia Medical School) liberally uses tables and figures to illustrate his direct commentary on the genetic aspects of congenital heart disease, risk factors, prenatal screening, anatomic landmarks of the fetal heart, the four-chamber view, ventricular outflow tracts, short-axis views, Doppler and M-Mode echocardiography, fetal cardiac biometry, and abnormal cardiac anatomy. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

4 Stars! from Doody