History of echocardiography in the Netherlands: 30 years of education and clinical applications

The development of ultrasound has created great opportunities for diagnostic cardiac imaging. For more than 30 years, echocardiography has been the most important and cost-effective diagnostic imaging modality in clinical cardiology. Many developments originated in the Netherlands, including the very first practical real-time crosssectional imaging of the moving heart with a linear array. Milestones include the first portable echo apparatus, early versions of echo catheters and transoesophageal echocardiography probes as well as many clinical ‘firsts’ with reference to the more than 100 Dutch dissertations related to echocardiography. The future of echocardiography promises to be as productive and exciting as it has been in the previous three decades, including threedimensional echocardiography, myocardial perfusion echocardiography, tissue Doppler imaging and speckle tracking. New potential therapeutic applications are upcoming. In this article, the advances of echocardiography in the Netherlands are described, in the past and during 30 years of education, as was recently presented by three Dutch pioneers during the ‘Echomiddagen 2006-2007’ organised by the CVOI. (Neth Heart J 2008;16: 16-20.)