Fetal speckle-tracking echocardiography: a comparison between two-dimensional and electronic spatio-temporal image...

Area of Science:

• Cardiology
• Medical Imaging
• Fetal Echocardiography

Background:

• Speckle tracking technology is crucial for assessing cardiac ventricular deformation.
• Electronic four-dimensional (4D) probes enable rapid acquisition of electronic spatio-temporal image correlation (eSTIC) volumes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate if e-STIC acquisition enhances the reproducibility of fetal ventricular deformation analyses.
• To compare the reliability of e-STIC with conventional 2D imaging for cardiac measurements.

Main Methods:

• Fetal echocardiography was performed on 20-40 week fetuses, acquiring both 2D clips and e-STIC volumes.
• Left ventricular global strain (LV-GS) and left ventricular ejection fraction (LV-FE) were analyzed.
• Intraobserver, interobserver, and intermethod agreement were assessed using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) and Bland-Altman plots.

Main Results:

• e-STIC showed no systematic difference from 2D for LV-GS but demonstrated higher mean values for LV-FE.
• Inter-rater reliability for LV-FE was superior with e-STIC compared to 2D.
• Intra-rater reliability for both LV-GS and LV-FE was significantly better with e-STIC than with 2D analysis.

Conclusions:

• e-STIC represents an advancement over 2D analysis for intra-rater reliability in fetal LV-GS assessment.
• Four-dimensional (4D) acquisition using e-STIC may overcome inherent limitations of speckle tracking echocardiography.