Diagnostic and Prognostic Implications of Surface Recordings from Patients with Atrioventricular Block.

The atrioventricular (AV) bridge is vulnerable to many circumstances that depress conduction. Abnormal impulse transmission may be caused by drugs, autonomic effects, or destructive processes. Type 1 (Wenckebach) AV block is owing to depressed AV nodal conduction and is recognized by a prolonging PR interval ending in a "dropped beat.

Abnormalities of Impulse Formation and Conduction.

This article examines abnormalities of impulse formation and conduction through the examples of various case studies.

Competency in cardiac examination skills in medical students, trainees, physicians, and faculty: a multicenter study.

Background: Cardiac examination is an essential aspect of the physical examination. Previous studies have shown poor diagnostic accuracy, but most used audio recordings, precluding correlation with visible observations. The training spectrum from medical students (MSs) to faculty has not been tested, to our knowledge.

Virtual tools for teaching electrocardiographic rhythm analysis.

Electrocardiographic (ECG) rhythm analysis is inadequately taught in training programs, resulting in undertrained physicians reading a large percentage of the 40 million ECGs recorded annually. The effective use of simple tools (calipers, ruler, and magnifier) required for crucial measurements and comparisons of intervals requires considerable time for interactive instruction and is difficult to teach in the classroom. The ECGViewer (Blaufuss Medical Multimedia Laboratories, Palo Alto, Calif) program was developed using virtual tools easily manipulated by computer mouse that can be used to analyze archived scanned ECGs on computer screens and classroom projection.