Ultrasonido tridimensional en cardiología/Three-dimensional ultrasound in cardiology

Cardiac images analysis is a useful tool for the diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of cardiovascular diseases. Image processing techniques allow cardiac function non-invasive quantitative evaluation, providing morphological, functional and dynamic information. The recent technological advances in ultrasound and the emergent techniques of processing and analysis of the images, have allowed increasing the patient treatment quality. However, the acquisition of these dynamic three-dimensional (3D) images generates large data volumes for processing, from which, the cardiac structures must be extracted and analyzed during the entire cardiac cycle. Extraction, 3D visualization, and quantification tools are currently used within the clinical routine, but unfortunately need significant interaction with the physician. These elements justify the development of new efficient and robust algorithms for the cardiac structures extraction and cardiac motion estimation from threedimensional images. As a result, the clinicians are provided with new means to accurately assess the anatomy and cardiac function from three-dimensional images, which represents a breakthrough within the investigation of a complete description of the heart from a single examination. The objective of this article is to show the advances in 3D cardiac ultrasound imaging and to further observe which areas have been studied under this imaging modality.