made by enigmaticdoc — CC BY-SA 4.0 (text), MIT (code). For educational purposes only.
PrefaceHow to Use This BookPart I — FoundationsPart II — Chamber Assessment and Applied PhysiologyPart III — Valvular Disease in the Critically IllPart IV — Transesophageal EchocardiographyPart V — Clinical SyndromesPart VI — Practice, Reporting and QualityAppendicesEvidence and Citation PolicyA free, open-source, guideline-referenced textbook of echocardiography for the critically ill. 43 chapters, 4 appendices, ~78,000 words.
📚 Guideline basis for this edition
Built on the 2025 generation of society documents: ASE 2025 diastolic function update (JASE 2025;38:537–69) · ASE 2025 right heart guideline · ASE 2024 prosthetic valve guideline (JASE 2024;37:2–63) · ESC/EACTS 2025 valvular heart disease guidelines · AHA 2025 CPR/ECC guidelines, Parts 9 and 11 · ESICM 2025 haemodynamic monitoring recommendations.
⚠️ Educational use only
This book is not medical advice, does not establish a standard of care, and does not confer clinical competence. Echocardiographic findings must be interpreted by clinicians trained and credentialled to do so, in the full clinical context of the individual patient.
Why this book exists
Critical care echocardiography is not cardiology performed in an ICU. The patient is supine, ventilated, oedematous, tachycardic and pharmacologically loaded; the loading conditions under which every published threshold was validated are absent. This book is written for that patient.
Three literatures collide at the bedside of a shocked, ventilated patient, and none was written for that bedside. Cardiology imaging supplies the thresholds, validated in ambulatory patients in sinus rhythm at rest. Point-of-care ultrasound supplies the accessibility, and is deliberately binary. Intensive care physiology supplies the reasoning — coupling, heart–lung interaction, the difference between fluid responsiveness and fluid need — and is largely absent from imaging teaching. Advanced critical care echocardiography holds all three at once.
Editorial rules
- No invented numbers. Every threshold, cut-off and constant carries a citation. Where societies disagree, both positions are stated with their sources rather than averaged.
- Guideline currency is declared. Each chapter opens with a Guideline basis callout naming the documents it rests on.
- Uncertainty is labelled, not hidden. Expert-opinion-only material says so.
- ICU-specific limitations are mandatory. Every parameter states how ventilation, arrhythmia, vasopressors and RV overload degrade it.