We have introduced echocardiography into the physiology courses for medical students to improve their understanding of cardiac physiology. Echocardiography allows a visualization of the events of the cardiac cycle and facilitates the correlation of anatomic structures with their physiological functions. The students record views on the human heart in the long and short axis, they follow wall and value motions, and they interpret the obtained data in correlation with electrocardiography and phonocardiography. Echocardiography offers the opportunity to measure the interval of isovolumetric contraction and isovolumetric relaxation and permits the calculation of parameters assigned to left ventricular contractility. An evaluation showed that medical students consider echocardiography to be the most significant and interesting part of the physiology courses. In conclusion, echocardiography has been shown to be a valuable tool for teaching cardiac physiology.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.