Evaluating Your Child

From stress echocardiograms to cardiac catheterization, Children’s Heart Institute offers dedicated pediatric diagnostic imaging services delivered efficiently in a caring environment. Our youngest heart patients are diagnosed before they are born.

Your child’s heart evaluation will include a medical history and a thorough cardiac physical exam, including blood pressure measurement and review of EKG results. If additional studies are needed, they will be ordered by your child’s cardiologist. Onsite sedation is available, with care provided by specially trained pediatric nurses.

A large part of our diagnostic work is done prenatally. Parents can be notified of their child’s heart defect before the child is born using a fetal echocardiogram. Because of the comprehensive nature of the care we provide, birth, care and surgery can all be done in the same hospital. Our Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Unit provides the highest level of care for babies with heart defects.

Diagnostic studies include:

• Electrocardiogram
• Echocardiogram
• Fetal echocardiogram
• Cardiac catheterization
• Holter monitor
• Exercise stress testing
• Oximetry
• Cholesterol check
• Computer-aided diagnosis
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
• CT scan
• Angiography
• Fluoroscopy
• Ultrasound evaluation

   
Echocardiogram (Echo)
An echocardiogram is a test that uses sound waves to produce a moving image of the patient’s beating heart on a video screen. The physician can study the heart’s thickness, size and function, as well as the motion pattern and structure of the four heart valves. The Children’s Heart Institute also does fetal echocardiograms on babies before birth.

Electrocardiogram (EKG)
The EKG is a painless test that records the heart’s electrical activity as a graph on a moving strip of paper or video monitor.

Holter Monitor
A Holter monitor is an electrocardiogram temporarily attached to a patient for 24 hours. It continuously records the heart’s electrical activity as patients go about their daily routines.

Cardiac Catheterization
Our catheterization labs are cool, low-lit rooms in which teams of physicians, nurses and cardiovascular technologists (CVTs) perform catheter-based tests and procedures. Cardiac catheterization, also called a “heart cath,” is the process by which a catheter is inserted by a physician into a blood vessel and directed to the heart to obtain information about the heart and its arteries.

Cardiac catheterization provides detailed information about the structure and functioning of the heart, and it is also a therapeutic tool. Many conditions can be treated with cardiac catheterization, using balloons and stents to avoid open heart surgery.

These include catheter-based treatments of aortic stenosis, pulmonary stenosis, atrial septal defect (ASD), coronary artery fistula and pulmonary arterio-venous malformations. The physicians associated with Memorial Hermann Children’s Heart Institute have a high success rate in performing these procedures.

Weekly Catheterization Conference
This conference provides a forum by which physicians from Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital and other facilities can present their cardiac patients’ cases to the entire team for opinions on the patient’s plan of care. The Cath Conference is typically attended by staff involved directly with the Children’s Heart Institute, but the conference is open to anyone who would like to learn.