LAUSR

When visiting a coronary care unit at a hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, an American cardiologist was surprised to see that resting ECGs did not look like the ones he was used to. Each ECG showed, for 1 typical cardiac cycle, 6 limb leads strung vertically at the left-hand side of a landscape-oriented, letter-size paper and immediately to the right thereof the 6 precordial leads arranged in the same way (Figures 1 and 2). The right-hand half of the paper showed 6 simultaneously recorded leads during the 10-second recording period (not shown). His Swedish colleague explained that the left-hand part of the paper is for morphology assessment, and the right-hand part is for assessment of cardiac rhythm. The 2 colleagues studied 2 ECGs of 2 recently admitted patients.