Echocardiographie aux soins intensifs: quelle utilité?

In intensive care unit the information managed by echocardiography is valuable. It allows often to facilitate the hemodynamic assessment of a instable patient and to guide rapidly the diagnostic track and hence his management. In this article we exhibit the different parameter, which could be obtained by this technique and present some situations in intensive care unit, in which echocardiography brings an uncontestable utility. Considering this approach as essential for a modern intensive medicine, we think that an intensivist should know to use this tool, so permitting to obtain at any time a necessary monitoring.