Valvular heart disease—measurement of valve orifice area and quantification of regurgitation

INTRODUCTION In 1929, Werner Forssmann published a radiograph of the successful right heart catheterization of himself (1). Subsequently Dickinson Richards and Andre Cournand used the heart catheter to make a series of seminal hemodynamic measurements in man resulting in the three men winning the Nobel Prize inMedicine in 1956 for their accomplishments. In 1951, the Gorlin Formula (2) for calculating cardiac valve area was published, and for the next three decades invasive hemodynamics held sway as the gold standard for assessing cardiac physiology and pathophysiology.