Cardiac Pathologies - Video Lesson

Hey, everybody. Welcome back. This short lesson is about cardiac pathologies that we can visualize in sectional imaging. First one that we'll talk about is what we call pericardial effusion. Affusions can occur in other places in the body, but pericardial effusion refers to excess fluid in the pericardial sac. Normally, there's so little fluid in the pericardial sac outside the heart that you can't even see it. And so if there is excess fluid there, we would call that pericardial effusion. Pericardial effusion may occur independently or it may occur in response to other pathologies. Perocardial effusion becomes a problem because it can influence the functionality of the heart. Here's a few examples of pericardial effusion. In the image to the left, you can see that outside of the heart, there is clearly some excess fluid. Normally, there is so little fluid in the pericardial space outside the heart that you really don't even notice it in sectional imaging. But here in this case,