"Echocardiography in Nigeria: use, problems, reproducibility and potentials".

Background: Although echocardiography is a useful and cost-effective technique for the detection of morphological and functional cardiac abnormalities, it has a main limitation in its subjectivity. Therefore the aim of the present study was to assess the intra-observer reproducibility and validity of 2-dimensional guided M-mode echo measurements at a Nigerian metropolitan Hospital.

Methods: Standard echocardiographic examination was performed on twenty randomly selected patients (11 men and 9 women) aged 59.