According to Schopenhauer problems are usually passing through three stages: - in the first stage they are ignored or just smiled at, - in the second stage they are fought, and in the third stage they are considered to be self-evident, just taken for granted. Whereas digital subtraction angiography (DSA) has obviously reached stage three of that scale, i.e. routine use in radiology, digital angiocardiography, in particular imaging the heart and coronary circulation, is still on its way to the final goal: the filmless heart catheterization laboratory for all invasive and interventional procedures. A few pioneers have already completely abandoned the conventional cine coronary and angiocardiographic technique, others - as we do -still combine both digital and conventional methods in clinical routine, but most cardiol ogists up till now stay sceptically aside. We hope that at least some of the articles published in this volume may convince more and more cardiologists that digital imaging procedures are the method of choice, in particular if quantitative assessment of the anatomical or functional status of the cardiovascular system is required (pre- and post operations or pre-and post-interventions). Such a critical control of all therapeutic procedures, be it by surgical, catheter-or medical 'interventions', is indeed an urgent and widely under estimated or neglected requirement.

Inhalt
I: Digital Angiocardiography for Diagnostic Routine.- 1. Results with digital angiography.- 2. Digital angiography in coronary heart disease.- 3. Digital coronary arteriography in the outpatient clinic.- 4. Digital subtraction angiography, the new standard in pediatric cardiology?.- 5. Quantitation of valvular regurgitation by digital ventricular angiocardiography.- 6. Quantification of aortic regurgitation.- 7. Quantitative assessment of aortic regurgitation by digital subtraction angiography.- 8. Quantitation of ventricular dynamic geometry by digital angiocardiography.- 9. Accuracy of digital subtraction angiocardiography for the assessment of global and regional left ventricular function at rest and during exercise.- 10. Assessment of synchronism of left ventricular wall motion.- 11. Assessment of left ventricular pressurevolume relationships using an automatic computerized videodensitometric approach.- 12. Computed triple orthogonal projections for optimal radiological imaging with biplane isocentric multidirectional X-ray systems.- 13. Clinical applications of cine computed tomography.- 14. Morphologic and densitometric analysis of coronary arteries.- 15. Comparison of 35 mm cine film and digital radiographic image imaging for quantitative coronary arteriography.- 16. Nonlinearity by densitometric measurements of coronary arteries.- 17. Three-dimensional reconstruction and cross-section measurements of coronary arteries using ECG-correlated digital coronary arteriography.- 18. Fast automatic recognition and 3D reconstruction of the coronary tree from DSA-projection pairs.- 19. Concepts for coronary flow and myocardial perfusion measurements.- 20. Blood flow measurements in digital cardiac angiography using 3D coronary artery reconstructions.- 21. Coronary blood flow and myocardial perfusion studied by digitized coronary angiograms.- 22. Comparison of time parameters derived from myocardial time-density curves in patients before and after percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty.- 23. Methods for calculation of coronary flow reserve by computer processing of digital angiograms.- 24. Parametric encoding of coronary arteriograms for the evaluation of hyperemic reserve.- 25. Digital angiographic transfer function analysis of regional myocardial perfusion: measurement system and coronary contrast transit linearity.- 26. Relation between coronary flow reserve and severity of coronary obstruction, both assessed from coronary cineangiogram.- 27. Coronary arteriography, stress test and coronary flow reserve measurements: comparative studies.- 28. Functional and anatomic assessment of coronary artery stenoses.- 29. Reconstruction of the spatial distribution of the myocardial perfusion from multiple-view arteriography.- 30. A bottleneck model of imaging systems for digital angiocardiography.- Index of subjects.