The Clinical Usefulness of NonInvasive and Invasive Tools in the Assessment of Left Ventricular Function in Myocardial Infarction

Abstract

First and foremost, as with all techniques in medicine, the assessment of the clinical value of any measurement, must be judged by four essential factors: the sensitivity of the method, its specificity, its utility and ultimately always its cost. I define here sensitivity as the chance of diagnosing correctly the disease when it is present, specificity as the chance of not diagnosing the disease when it is not there, utility as the ease with which a tool can be used under everyday “battlefield” conditions (and not therefore the utility in an isolated laboratory setting or in a research environment) and finally the cost, that is, the total expense needed for the purchase and maintenance of apparatus as well as the manpower and time needed for the performance of that test as well as its interpretation.