Clinical InvestigationProspective Assessment of Fetal Cardiac Function With Speckle Tracking in Healthy Fetuses and Recipient Fetuses of Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome
Section snippets
Study Population
We performed this prospective case-control study at the University Hospitals Leuven (Leuven, Belgium) after approval of the protocol by the hospital ethics committee for clinical studies. All mothers gave informed consent for this study.
As a control group, we recruited 59 women with uncomplicated singleton pregnancies attending our routine prenatal clinic at a gestational age between 16 and 36 weeks. They received additional ultrasound examinations for the sole purpose of measuring fetal
Control Fetuses
Fifty-nine controls were recruited for the study. The mean gestational age at ultrasound was 24.4 weeks (range, 16.9-36 weeks). Adequate cardiac 4-chamber view cine-loop clips could be obtained in 55 fetuses (93%), with frame rates ranging from 60 to 110 Hz. The fetal heart could not be visualized adequately in 2 cases because of fetal position and in 2 because of maternal obesity. Fifty-five fetuses theoretically yield 495 cardiac segments to track (3 segments per cardiac wall, 3 walls per
Discussion
Our findings show that even in uncomplicated pregnancies, speckle tracking is subject to the same technical limitations that compromise other grayscale methods for assessing ventricular function. Adequate imaging was possible in only 93% of the controls, with maternal obesity and suboptimal fetal position as leading factors for not acquiring appropriate images. Other limitations were related to the method such as; another 10% of examinations failed because the ventricular walls could not be
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