This Symposium is the third of a series of scientific meetings in the field of echocardiology, held at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. * The series was initiated by Klaas Born, who organized the first two meetings with great success. These followed the procedure of two days of parallel sessions with invited speakers only. This time, we decided to broaden the basis of the meeting and have a three-day program of parallel sessions, combining invited papers, free com munications and posters. We decided, however, to maintain one of the most striking features of the last meeting- having the complete proceedings available at the time of the meeting. We confronted the authors-to-be with a very tight schedule in order to make the book a true reflection of the state of the art in echocardiology. As a 'result, editing time was also very limited and neither terminology nor units have been completely standardized. This book has three main parts. The first, and largest, part consists of contributions on echocardiology in adults, and is divided into four sections. The first section is a general survey of various applications, whereas the remaining three centre round specific applications, i.e. ischemic disease, left ventricular function and cardiac valves, respectively. The second part con tains applications in pediatric cardiology; due to the wide variety of topics covered, no particular subdivision has been made. The last part of the book is devoted to instrumentation, methods and new developments.