Quantitative evaluation of fetal ventricular function by speckle tracking echocardiography

Area of Science:

• Cardiology
• Fetal Medicine
• Medical Imaging

Background:

• Fetal heart abnormalities require accurate diagnostic tools.
• Assessing myocardial deformation is crucial for understanding fetal cardiac function.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the feasibility and repeatability of Automated Cardiac Motion Quantification (aCMQ) for assessing fetal ventricular myocardial deformation.
• To compare myocardial deformation parameters between fetuses with and without cardiac abnormalities.

Main Methods:

• Included 59 normal and 50 abnormal fetal hearts.
• Utilized aCMQ to measure left and right ventricular global longitudinal strain (GLS) at endocardial, mid-myocardial, and epicardial layers.
• Performed correlation and reproducibility analyses.

Main Results:

• Fetal ventricular GLS decreased from endocardium to epicardium.
• Abnormal fetuses showed significantly lower GLS in all myocardial layers (P < 0.05).
• GLS correlated with gestational age in abnormal fetuses, but not in normal ones. High inter- and intra-observer reliability (ICC > 0.75).

Conclusions:

• aCMQ is a feasible and repeatable tool for evaluating fetal ventricular myocardial deformation.
• aCMQ provides valuable information for managing pregnancies with fetal heart abnormalities.