So you may recall that my dad had some heart surgery recently. The cause was a faulty valve and there was some chance that it was hereditary, so I went in yesterday and got a echocardiogram. Basically it's a ultrasound of my heart.

It's a boy?

On the screen, with everything moving and wiggling and valving and what-not, it was pretty clear what I was looking it. The still-frame, unfortunately, is more or less worthless. Apparently, as you can see in the lower-left, I have a good half of the Triforce. This bodes well for my health. I think what we're looking at here is the cockles of my heart, but it could just as easily be the surface of titan.

Yeah so the ultrasound was cool to watch, not much good on paper. But what they do is draw a line that goes through and perpendicular to one of your valves, then draw a waterfall display of how the features along that line evolve over time. It looks like this:

Basically, that's fluid velocity (derived from Doppler shift) on the Y axis and time on the X. The area under a peak tells you about the amount of fluid that came through a valve during that portion of the rhythm. I think the "hollow" peaks are a result of bi-directional flow around a closing valve (sort of like when you slam a door in a closed room—the door pushes most of the air in the direction the door is moving, but some air rapidly rushes around the edges back into the room to fill the rarefaction behind the door. Boyle's Law or some crap). Here's another one, this time of a different valve:

One of the cool parts of this procedure is that they convert these waterfall charts to audio in realtime, so when you see a peak you hear something that could be construed as the sound of the valve. It's not really; it's actually the fluid velocity represented as frequency. But the sound is awesome. Kinda eerie. And those sharp peaks, they sounded exactly like someone cracking a whip. I like to think that somewhere in the sub-cockles region, a little tiny Indiana Jones is escaping from a pit of snakes. Asps. Very dangerous.

Anyway, the short version of all of this is that a trained cardiologist using the Sonom 5500 couldn't find any sign of any defect with my heart. It appeared highly normal and I won't have any surprise aneurysms.

And I have an aeortic root diameter of over 3cm. I'm no Lance Armstrong, but I don't have to worry that mountaineering might make my chest explode or something.