WITH THE advancement of cardiac surgery accurate diagnosis of congenital heart and vascular defects, by necessity, has had to keep pace. Not only is it important to determine which patients will be benefited by surgery, but those patients who will not be benefited must be recognized as well. Cardiac catheterization and angiocardiography have added much to the diagnostic armamentarium, but these techniques are difficult or impossible to use with small infants. The cyanotic infant still constitutes a difficult diagnostic problem, and many do not live to be over one month of age.
In the hope of facilitating a more complete understanding of the congenital heart disease which manifests itself in the first few months of life, we should like to report three unusual cases and a review of the literature of cases of persistent truncus arteriosus communis associated with a single ventricle.
Wilson,1 in 1798, reported one of the