European Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine

Introduction; aortic valve replacement is a common wide spread surgical procedure performed worldwide. One of the main problems in such procedure is facing a small aortic ring to which the surgeon may not have a suitable size valve. So all efforts are made to try to measure the aortic ring preoperatively by different methods like transthoracic echocardiography, transesophageal echocardiography, CT scan and others Objectives; the main objective of this study is to assess the ability of transthoracic echocardiography in successfully measuring the aortic ring in Mosul Center for Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery and comparing it with other measurement methods. Methods; this is a retrospective clinical case series study conducted in Mosul Center for Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery over the period from June 2012 to February 2014. 54 patients were included in the study and were studied according to their sex and age distribution, type and cause of aortic valve disease, aortic valve morphology, echocardiographic and intraoperative aortic ring sizing. Results; 48.1% of our patients had an echocardiographic and intraoperative aortic valve measurement within 1 mm difference while 28.8% had an echocardiographic aortic ring being 1-2.5 mm larger than the intraoperative aortic ring measurement and 23.1% had the echocardiographic measurements being more than 2.5 mm larger than the actual intraoperative size. Discussion: these results were found to be comparable to other international results and also comparable to other studies that used other preoperative measurement methods Conclusion; transthoracic echocardiographic measurement of the aortic ring is a safe, non-invasive and reliable method for measuring the aortic ring without the need for other invasive and expensive procedures however the surgeon should prepare at least one valve size smaller than the echocardiographic measured aortic ring for safety.