Quantitative Three-dimensional Echocardiography

Echocardiography is the most important non-invasive diagnostic tool for the clinical management of cardiac patients1. Measurement of left ventricular volume and function are the most common clinical referral questions to the echocardiography laboratory because of its value in clinical decision-making, assessment of therapeutic effects and determination of prognosis. Therefore, an accurate, fast and easy measurement of left ventricular volume and function is important. Two-dimensional echocardiography remains the most widely used method, but the advantages of three-dimensional echocardiography over two-dimensional echocardiography are increasingly recognised. Using two-dimensional echocardiography, only a limited number of cross-sections of the heart are available for analysis, while three-dimensional echocardiography allows reconstruction or real-time acquisition of a single dataset encompassing the complete heart. From this dataset an indefinite number of cross-sections and viewing planes can be analyzed, avoiding the geometric assumptions of left ventricular shape and the foreshortened image acquisition of the left ventricular cavity.

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