Archives for January 2025

The latest issue of CASE is now available with intriguing reports, including “Aortic Stenosis With Dynamic Left Ventricular Outflow Obstruction: Diagnostic and Management Challenges—A Case Series.” CASE Editor-in-Chief Vincent Sorrell, MD, FASE, remarked, “One of the commonly encountered, but difficult diagnostic and clinical scenarios, is the patient with serial obstructive lesions. Fortunately, for CASE readers, they now have an outstanding CASE series from Qian et al. who took the time to prepare many such examples. Using CASE report formats to educate us, these authors provide us with their expert insights and approach to three diverse clinical examples—using Doppler as well as 2D and 3D echocardiography to guide the assessment of the hemodynamic significance at each level of serially obstructive lesions. Starting with TTE as the diagnostic modality of choice, they also discuss the incremental value of TEE and invasive hemodynamics. This is another CASE report you will want in your growing file of CASE reports included in your Echo Lab Educational Curriculum Folder.”

In addition to this Doppler Dilemmas report, Ochi et al. demonstrate a “dove-coo murmur” that originated from pulmonary regurgitation, revealing how to compare visual signals on spectral Doppler displays with their audio counterparts. This issue continues with two reports in the Congenital Heart Disease category. Shaw et al. report on a venous anomaly where the right SVC and IVC drained into the LA, including echo Doppler images to show the associated shunt lesions and cardiac CT images used to guide surgical repair. Chen et al. use echo and cardiac CT for a patient with bicuspid AV, an anomalous coronary artery, and a congenitally malformed papillary muscle – a reminder of how often adults are affected by previously undiagnosed congenital heart disease. Fetal Echocardiography rounds out this issue, with Tunks et al. reporting on an infant with a tortuous, elongated left-sided aortic arch, offering suggestions on how to approach antenatal diagnoses and the importance of multidisciplinary serial follow up.

Dr. Sorrell’s editorial describes the relatively recent transition from analog to digital echo, assessing the benefits of this transition while reminiscing on the technology that served us well at the time. Be sure to check out the latest Unlock the CASE on the CASE homepage, which was the winning entry from the Cardio-oncology SIG Case Competition.

SUBMIT your case report to us! Whether it will be your first time submitting a case or your 50^th, we are here to make it a great experience. Email us with questions or submit your report today!

Effective January 1, 2025, the new CPT code 0932T – Noninvasive detection of heart failure derived from augmentative analysis of an echocardiogram that demonstrated preserved ejection fraction, with interpretation and report by a physician or other qualified health care professional will replace the previous HCPCS outpatient code C9786.

This code will be available for use in both the physician office and hospital outpatient settings. Additionally, this service will continue to be covered in the hospital inpatient setting using the New Technology Add-on Payment (NTAP) code XXE2X19.

Questions about coding? ASE provides members access to a coding expert. Log in to your ASE Member Portal and click “Advocacy,” then “Ask A Coding Expert” to submit your questions.

The January issue of JASE includes a brief research communication titled, “Sustained Benefits of Mavacamten in Patients With Obstructive Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy: Long-Term Assessment Using Artificial Intelligence–Electrocardiogram and Echocardiographic Data.” Author Said Alsidawi, MD, remarks, “In this paper, we show that mavacamten has sustained benefit on left ventricular diastolic function based on AI-ECG data and echo parameters when assessed after 6 months of therapy. These benefits were independent of LVOT gradient relief and might suggest an intrinsic effect on the myocytes.”

Two other brief research communications are included in this issue; the first discusses a novel echocardiography feature-tracking algorithm for stabilized frame-to-frame extraction of aortic root diameters in the parasternal long axis, and another comes to us from Australia and New Zealand, spotlighting young people with rheumatic mitral regurgitation living in remote areas. This issue’s original investigations incorporate a variety of topics including cardiac function in long COVID, coronary artery disease, and normal values in 3D echocardiography. An editorial comment accompanies an original investigation on the prevalence of diastolic and systolic mitral annular disjunction in patients with mitral valve prolapse. Rounding out this issue is the correspondence section—read about efficacy of goal-directed Valsalva in patients with obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy taking mavacamten, targeted neonatal echo based hemodynamic consultation in the ICU, and dobutamine in low-flow, low-gradient severe aortic stenosis with preserved ejection fraction.

This month’s President’s Message is guest written by members of ASE’s Research and Research Oversight Committees, Jonathan Lindner, MD, FASE; Daniel Forsha, MD, FASE; and Raymond Stainback, MD, FASE, and highlights the vital work of clinician-scientists and ASE’s ongoing efforts to support scientists and innovation in this realm of echo.

A new call for papers is now open! A focus issue on chamber quantification is set for publication in early 2026. Papers that address any aspect of echocardiography in quantitative assessment of the cardiac chambers should be submitted by June 1, 2025. Please direct questions to JASE managing editor Debbie Meyer at dmeyer@asecho.org.

It is with immense sadness that we announce that a dedicated ASE and ASE Foundation champion, James Kirkpatrick, MD, FASE, University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC), passed away unexpectedly on January 1, 2025. Dr. Kirkpatrick was a highly respected colleague, mentor, and friend to all who knew him.

Dr. Kirkpatrick graduated from Pomona College and received his MD from Loma Linda University. He completed his internship and residency at Yale in internal medicine and clinical medical ethics and cardiology fellowships at the University of Chicago. He was one of the few ethics-trained cardiologists in the United States. He was on the cardiovascular and ethics faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, before he joined UWMC cardiology in 2015 as Professor of Medicine, Section Chief of Cardiac Imaging, and the Director of the Echo lab at UWMC. He was also a Professor of Bioethics and Humanities, the Ethics Committee Chair, and an Ethics Consultant at UWMC.

Dr. Kirkpatrick’s volunteerism for ASE began in 2009 just three years after joining ASE as a Scientific Sessions Abstract Grader. This was just the beginning of a tremendous volunteer career at ASE that included serving on the ASE Board of Directors 2016-2019 and most recently as the chair of the ASE Foundation Board (2022-2024). He was currently serving as the chair of the Awards Committee and co-chair of Echo Hawaii that is set to take place in a couple weeks. He was the chair of the 2023 ASE Scientific Sessions, an advocate for and member of the ImageGuideEcho Registry, a key member in creating the Critical Care Echocardiography Specialty Interest Group that became a Council in 2022, and a member of the JASE Editorial Board (2016-2022).

Dr. Kirkpatrick gave many lectures at ASE Scientific Sessions over the years, including the Richard E. Kerber Ethics/Humanitarian Lecture titled “Ethical Challenges in the Practice of Echocardiography: What is Right and How Do We Do It?” in 2018. He was the chair of the September 2024 ASE Guideline “Recommendations for Cardiac Point-of-Care Ultrasound Nomenclature” and the April 2020 “Recommendations for Echocardiography Laboratories Participating in POCUS and Critical Care Echocardiography Training.” He also served on the writing group of the August 2015 “Echocardiography in the Management of Patients with LVADs,” and chaired two ASE COVID statements (2020 and 2024).

Everyone who knew Dr. Kirkpatrick knew he was passionate about education and global health events in medically underserved areas. He was an integral leader on five ASE Foundation Global Health outreach events in Vietnam, which is the home country of his wife Thanh. His goal was to establish sustainable medical education mechanisms that would yield long-lasting benefits even after the Foundation’s volunteers left.

Dr. Kirkpatrick’s dedication to his patients, his peers, and the field of cardiovascular ultrasound will be tremendously missed. Our hearts go out to his wife and his three children, his colleagues at the University of Washington, and his ASE family.