Contrast echocardiography and medical economics: looking into the crystal ball

The past decade has witnessed the development of contrast echocardiography. This technique has demonstrated clinical utility in some applications and extremely promising results have been reported for others, although there are still several obstacles to its acceptance by regulatory authorities and routine users. In addition, the efficacy and cost-effectiveness must be proven against 'gold standard' techniques, which in several cases are just accepted standards. Furthermore, the competition is quite strong both between new techniques and with established ones, and all of the imaging modalities need to find their most appropriate role within this complex environment. (C) 2002 The European Society of Cardiology.