The Role of 3D Echocardiography in the Assessment of Valvular Heart Disease

of cardiac structures. Image resolution remains a concern for transthoracic 3D imaging, but the recent development of 3D transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) (either real-time or reconstructed) has made this less of an issue. Development of 3D echocardiography has made vast contributions to the understanding of mitral valve function. Although in the majority of patients with mitral stenosis, comprehensive 2D and Doppler echocardiography is sufficient, several clinical trials have demonstrated that 3D echocardiographic mitral valve planimetry can provide better correlation with invasively determined mitral valve area. An example of this technique using 3D transthoracic imaging is shown in Figure 1. With the advent of real-time 3D TEE, rapidly obtainable views of the mitral valve, either from Current Trends in the Practice of Medicine Vol. 26, No. 5, 2010