Three-Dimensional Echocardiography – Principles and Promises

Three-Dimensional Echocardiography –
Principles and Promises
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