Echocardiographic Left Atrial Assessment. Experience Gained from the BENEFIT Project

Presentation Description / Summary: Echocardiographic assessment of left atrial (LA) size is important for cats and dogs with cardiac diseases. Multiple factors may influence how veterinary echocardiographers assess the LA size in dogs, and variation in assessment may negatively impact accuracy of disease severity assessment and prognostication and how individual veterinarians interpret published clinical study results and expert treatment guidelines. Although it is widely presumed that veterinary echocardiographers use different methods and have different preferences for assessing the LA size in dogs, the extent of this variation has, to our knowledge, never been systematically investigated in a large-scale study using scientifically tested and recommended methods. The gloBal caninE and feliNE leFt atrIal sIze assessmenT (BENEFIT) project is an international research collaboration aiming to explore how veterinary echocardiographers assess the LA size in dogs and cats- Two large scale global survey studies (approximately 670 respective 530 echocardiographers have participated in these studies) have recently been conducted by the BENEFIT group in order to investigate veterinary echocardiographers’ preferences concerning LA size assessment in cats and dogs. Appropriately designed survey studies, that comply with scientific guidelines for survey construction, can highlight differences and similarities in clinical imaging practice among echocardiographers and serve as valuable base for future work aimed at harmonizing cardiac imaging. We hope to get the possibility to present the results from these two studies at ACVIM, and also to provide more information about our ongoing prospective studies about LA size assessment in dogs.