Echocardiography courses include transesophageal, fetal, adult, pediatric, instrumentation, stress, cardiac physiology, and ultrasound. Students typically have an associate’s degree in a health discipline and learn terminology, techniques, and professional precautions. Courses focus on specific demographics and equipment used to create echocardiograms. Stress echocardiography measures echoes during supervised cardiovascular stress.
Different types of echocardiography courses include transesophageal echocardiography, fetal echocardiography, adult echocardiography, and echocardiographic instrumentation. Additional courses include those focused on cardiac physiology, ultrasound, stress echocardiography, and pediatric echocardiography. Students entering the study of echocardiography, which is the use of ultrasound waves and their echoes to probe the heart’s activity, usually have at least an associate’s degree in a health discipline and take introductory courses that teach terminology, techniques and related protocols and professional precautions.
Transesophageal echocardiography courses focus on reading the heart’s movements and conditions through an endoscope inserted into the esophagus. In these courses, students learn the proper anesthesia for this procedure, formally called a transesophageal echocardiogram. Courses related to this type of surgical procedure may focus on which heart patients can benefit from this type of echocardiogram, how to interpret the image of the heart created by the ultrasound waves, and how to determine the velocity of blood flow from the sound waves.
Fetal, adult, and pediatric echocardiography courses focus on the use of echocardiograms to diagnose heart disease in specific demographics: fetuses, adults, and children, respectively. These courses make an in-depth study of heart problems linked to specific age groups. For example, in pediatric courses, cognitive heart failure is a condition frequently studied through the use of echocardiograms. In fetal courses, where students learn to test the heart condition of an unborn baby during the last few months of pregnancy, improper heart development due to abnormal genes or chromosomes is a typical focus.
Echocardiographic instrumentation courses involve studying the equipment used to create echocardiograms, such as the many varieties of transducers that convert sound into an image. Some use a pulse Doppler shift and some use a sustained Doppler shift. Students learn to read all of the test results produced by the instruments, analyzing features such as wave motion, wave amplitude, and wave brightness. How to analyze image resolution and contrast would also be taught in instrumentation-focused echocardiography courses.
Stress echocardiography courses teach students to measure echoes created by the sound waves bouncing off the heart as the patient experiences supervised cardiovascular stress. In the field of echocardiography, stress usually means exercise; the most typical exercise used for stress echocardiography is running or walking on a treadmill at a maximal rate. Physiology courses related to echocardiography teach students the entire structure of the heart and all of its chambers, and ultrasound courses teach students how to recognize and interpret sound patterns.
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