Searchable, sortable normal Doppler values for aortic and mitral valve replacements.
Around the echo lab we are politely referring to the recent JASE Guideline Recommendations for Evaluation of Prosthetic Valves as "the Beast". Both for the size of the article (40 pages!) as well as the onus of now having to perform a more exhaustive evaluation on our valve replacement patients. We were used to just imaging the valve motion, reporting peak/mean gradients, and that was that.
I have no intention here of commenting on the Guidelines per se— interested readers should familiarize themselves with the actual document. I do want to mention the appendices, however, as I saw an opportunity to contribute and improve on the published data. Well, not the data itself so much as access to the data.
The five pages of tabular data summarizing the bulk of knowledge of normal Doppler parameters for prosthetic valves should be immediately available to anyone performing/reading an echo on a patient with a prosthetic valve. This is, I am sure, the reason for publishing the data tables in the first place. An Old School approach would have us photocopy, laminate, and bind the Journal pages and then keep them in the echo lab in conspicuously useful places.
I sought to put these tables some place even more useful, and simultaneously make the information easier to sift through:
Try using the search box and sorting the data by clicking on the header columns.
NOTE: The data is straight from The Guidelines which is in turn adapted from other works. Please let me know if you find any discrepancies with the published data. If your particular valve/size is not listed, sorry.
