Original articleReal-time 3-Dimensional Echocardiographic Imaging of Congenital Heart Disease Using Matrix-array Technology: Freehand Real-time Scanning Adds Instant Morphologic Details Not Well Delineated by Conventional 2-Dimensional Imaging
Section snippets
Patients
A total of 70 patients with various simple or complex congenital heart defects underwent echocardiographic examination as a part of their routine clinical care. Age ranged from newborn infants to 38 years, with a median age of 3 years. The spectrum of cardiac lesions ranged from simple defects such as atrial septal defect (ASD) and ventricular septal defect (VSD) to complex lesions such as hypoplastic left heart syndrome, Ebstein’s anomaly, and heterotaxy syndrome (Table 1). The
Results
The patient characteristics and the findings of RT3D are summarized in Table 1. In 23 patients, the question concerned the morphology of the atrioventricular valve (AVV) and the mechanism and origin of the valve regurgitation. This included mitral (Figure 1), tricuspid (Figure 2), and common AVV, both in simple and complex lesions. In RT3D, the leaflets of the AVV were seen from both the ventricular and atrial perspectives. Color flow display of the valvular regurgitation was similar to 2D
Discussion
Among the innovative techniques that have been developed in pediatric echocardiography, RT3D has one of the most important potential applications for day-to-day clinical care.1, 2 The use of earlier versions of RT3D in echocardiographic diagnosis of congenital heart disease has been documented and validated both clinically and in vitro.10, 11 However, these earlier attempts relied on offline analyses of reconstructed images, which was cumbersome, was time-consuming, and produced poor images
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