This is the second edition of a very popular book, first published in 1982. Since the first version came out, the vascular laboratory examination has become a firmly established part of the evaluation of vascular patients. Vascular laboratories have proliferated throughout the country—in physicians' offices and in hospitals as well as in traveling vans that visit offices, nursing homes, and shopping malls.
Needless to say, some of these laboratories are very sophisticated, some are very primitive. In the early 1970s we used to say jokingly that a vascular laboratory was a blood pressure cuff, a treadmill, and a portable Doppler device. Now there are Color Duplex Scanners costing hundreds and thousands of dollars, computerized plethysmographs, and automated reports. Physicians interested in vascular disease have had to learn a new vocabulary, become familiar with scanning techniques, relearn their college physics, and, more important, try to put these new techniques into their