Transesophageal echocardiography has advantages over transthoracic technique in defining morphology of atrial structures. Even though real time three-dimensional echocardiographic imaging is a reality, the off-line reconstruction technique usually allows to obtain higher spatial resolution images. The purpose of this study was to explore the accuracy of off-line three-dimensional transesophagea...

Methods Consecutive patients scheduled for MitraClip were prospectively studied. Patients with pacemaker or ICD were excluded. Transthoracic echocardiography and CMR at 1.5 Tesla were performed before and 6 months after MitraClip procedure. Left ventricular volumes were measured using transthoracic echocardiography (biplane Simpson’s method) and short-axis SSFP CMR images covering the left vent...

Intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) is a relatively new method of ultrasound images useful during cardiac percutaneous interventional procedures. The first human experience with this method was published in 2000 and, since then, several original trials have enrolled this useful method, proving similar and more useful than transesophageal echocardiography in percutaneous treatment of several con...

Postoperative transesophageal echocardiography images of a patient undergoing unidirectional valved patch closure of ventricular septal defect in the setting of severe pulmonary hypertension are presented. The images and videos elegantly demonstrate a functioning valve without any obstruction to the left ventricular outflow.

Real-time 3-dimensional echocardiography (RT3DE) permits the acquisition and visualization of the beating heart in 3D. Despite a number of efforts to automate the left ventricle (LV) delineation from RT3DE images, this remains a challenging problem due to the poor nature of the acquired images usually containing missing anatomical information and high speckle noise. Recently, there have been ef...

T he ability to imagine a 3-dimensional (3D) image of the heart was one of the earliest recognized benefits of 2-dimensional (2D) echocardiography at its inception 40 years ago. The ability to build such an image in real time has been a remarkable feat of image processing in the past decade. Intuitively, 3D imaging is the future of echocardiography, and the superiority of this method compared w...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW To reiterate the necessity of integrating echocardiography in the management of shocked patients and to propose a step-by-step functional evaluation of hemodynamics proven to optimize hemodynamic monitoring and to adapt the treatment. RECENT FINDINGS Echocardiography has become the cornerstone to hemodynamic monitoring. By providing real-time images, echocardiography has the...

BACKGROUND Cardiac catheterization is routinely performed in patients with single ventricle before bidirectional Glenn operation (BDG). There is interest in noninvasive evaluation alone before BDG, but concern for echocardiography successfully imaging the relevant anatomy persists. We evaluated the accuracy of echocardiographic imaging of vascular anatomy. METHODS AND RESULTS Diagnostic image...