| Echocardiography |
| Advantages |
| First line for diagnosis and follow-up |
| Widely available |
| Low cost |
| Safe and repeatable |
| Bedside (critically ill and pericardiocentesis) |
| Modalities |
| M-mode |
| 2D echocardiography |
| Doppler |
| Tissue doppler velocities |
| Deformation Imaging |
| 3D echocardiography |
| Contrast echocardiography |
| Twist and rotation |
| Limitations |
| Limited windows |
| Poor quality imaging |
| Operator dependent |
| Limited tissue characterization |
| Cardiac CT |
| Advantages |
| Better anatomic description |
| Evaluation of associated/extracardiac disease |
| Pre-operative planning |
| Detection of pericardial calcification |
| Modalities |
| Axial imaging |
| Multiplanar reconstruction |
| Volume renderer imaging |
| Cine-imaging |
| Limitations |
| Ionizing radiation |
| Iodinated contrast |
| Functional evaluation only possible with retrospective-gated studies |
| Difficult in case of arrhythmias |
| Need for breath-hold |
| Hemodynamically stable patients only |
| CMR |
| Advantages |
| Better anatomic description |
| Evaluation of associated/extracardiac disease |
| Pre-operative planning |
| Repeatable |
| Modalities |
| Bright blood-single-shot SSFP |
| Black blood images (+STIR) |
| Tagged cine-images |
| Bright blood cine-images |
| Late gadolinium enhancement images |
| Real time gradient-echo cine-images |
| Limitations |
| Time-consumming, high cost |
| Difficult in case of arrhythmias |
| Contraindicated with some devices (pacemakers, AICD...) |
| Calcifications not well visualized |
| Gadolinium not recommended if glomeral filtration rate <30mL/min) |
| Need for breth-hold |
| Hemodynamically stable patients only |
SSFP = steady-state-free precession; STIR = short inversion time inversion-recovery.
Adapted from Verhaert D, et al.