Three-Dimensional Echocardiography - Principles and Promises

Journal of Clinical and Basic Cardiology 2002; 5 (2): 149-152

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Keywords: Dreidimensional,  Echokardiographie,  Echtzeit-3-D-Echokardiographie,  3-dimensional,  echocardiography,  real time 3D-echocardiography

Three-dimensional echocardiography facilitates spatial recognition of intracardiac structures, potentially enhancing diagnostic confidence of conventional echocardiography. In addition, 3D-echocardiography allows exact computation of cardiac volumes and could serve as a teaching tool in cardiology. Over the last decade, significant developments in 3D-echocardiography have been made. Refinements in instrumentation, data acquisition, post processing and computation speed together with improvements in 2D-image quality could now allow three-dimensional echocardiography to play an important role in clinical echocardiography. This review focuses on the methodology, current status, potential clinical applications and future direction of 3D-echocardiography.