Costs and wastes in anesthesia care.

Purpose Of Review: The current economic climate has put pressure on healthcare systems and providers, including anesthesiologists, to minimize costs without sacrificing patient safety. In this review, we discuss costs associated with anesthesia care, including medications and intraoperative monitoring, and suggest ways to reduce wastes and overall expenditure.

Recent Findings: Significant amount, perhaps 20-50%, of drugs drawn up are never used but discarded as whole ampoules or vials.

Quadricuspid aortic valve with aortic insufficiency: case report and review of the literature.

We report the case of a 42-year-old woman with aortic regurgitation discovered to be caused by a quadricuspid aortic valve (QAV) diagnosed by intraoperative transesophageal echocardiogram. With improvements in echocardiographic imaging, the diagnosis of QAV is likely to be made more reliably in the future and should prompt close clinical follow-up given the frequent association of this lesion with valvular insufficiency.

Clinical Determinations of Volumes of Normal and Aneurysmatic Left Ventricles by Three-Dimensional Transesophageal Echocardiography.

Biplane methods of determining left ventricular volumes are inaccurate in the presence of aneurysmal distortions. Multiplane transesophageal echocardiography, which provides multiple, unobstructed cross-sectional views of the heart from a single, stable position, has the potential for more accurate determinations of volumes of irregular cavity forms than the biplane methods. The aim of the study was to determine the feasibility of three-dimensional measurements of ventricular volumes in patients with normal and aneurysmatic left ventricles by using multiplane transesophageal echocardiography.