Three-Dimensional Echocardiography: Current Status and Real-Life Applications.
The use of cardiac ultrasound is fundamental to the understanding of normal heart function and crucial to pathophysiological diagnosis. The growing availability of 3D echocardiography (3DE) over the last decade has allowed its applications to expand from establishing reference values for chamber size and elucidating ventricular mechanics, to assessing valvular disease severity and playing pivotal roles in interventional procedures. Several important advantages of 3DE include eliminating geometric assumptions, quantifying complex geometric shape volumes, viewing structures from any perspective, assessing lesion in simultaneous multiplanes or multislice mode, all of which are not possible with traditional 2D echocardiography (2DE). Real-time 3DE has been shown to be simple, accurate, reproducible, and versatile, and generally has superior outcome prognosis compared to the 2DE.
Department of Cardiology, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Linkou Medical Center, Taoyuan, Taiwan; ; Second Department of Internal Medicine.
Victor Chien-Chia
VC
Wu
Department of Laboratory and Transfusion Medicine, University of Occupational and Environmental Health, School of Medicine, Kitakyushu, Japan.
Masaaki
M
Takeuchi
3D echocardiography; Chamber mechanics; Valvular lesions