Dear Colleagues,

Despite the armamentarium of the clinician is now provided of several imaging techniques, each with unique advantages and applications, echocardiography remains the cornerstone imaging technique due to its unparalled availability, rapidity, portability, and real time capabilities. And it is the most commonly used technique by cardiologists for diagnosis, management and procedural guidance, and follow-up.

In the last decades, there has been a wide development of novel applications, including Doppler, tissue Doppler, flow dynamics, contrast echocardiography, speckle tracking imaging, and 3D echocardiography. These methods provided important pathophysiological insights in the anatomical and functional quantification of ventricles, atria and valves, demonstrating their incremental prognostic role.

However, we believe that the last advance of echocardiography, in most recent years, is the gradual implementation and expanded application of these sophisticated techniques into busy echocardiography laboratory clinical practices.

The emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and especially machine learning products allowed improvement of image quality, reproducibility and helped to speed workflow by automated quantification of anatomy and function of chambers and valves and may help the spread and facilitate the use of these new complex tools. The COVID pandemia contributed to understanding the importance to extend the use of echocardiography especially with miniaturization to other specialty and clinical settings such as in the emergency department with POCUS.

Topics which will be welcomed in this Special Issue of Journal of Clinical Medicine include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Speckle tracking imaging;
• Left ventricular and atrial function;
• 3D echocardiography;
• Valve disease quantification (low gradient aortic stenosis, secondary mitral regurgitation, tricuspid regurgitation);
• Left ventricular geometry;
• Artificial intelligence application;
• POCUS;
• Stress echocardiography.

especially focusing on their clinical application in medical practice.

Dr. Francesca Bursi
Dr. Giovanni Benfari
Guest Editors

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• advanced echocardiography
• speckle tracking imaging
• 3D echocardiography
• left ventricular function
• left atrial function
• right ventricular function
• valve disease quantification
• artificial intelligence application
• POCUS
• stress echocardiography