Three-dimensional echocardiography (3D echo) sources of measurement errors in the calculation of chamber volumes

Top: Cross-sectional views of a water-filled latex balloon with two alternative manually traced boundaries: along the inner interface (left), and in the center of the latex layer (right). Volumes resulting from each tracing session in this balloon are shown to be compared with the true volume of 150 mL. Bottom: Example of short-axis cut-planes extracted from RT3DE datasets: while in one patient (left), trabeculae can be well visualized and clearly differentiated from the myocardium, in another patient (right), the spatial resolution of the RT3DE image is not sufficient to provide this kind of detail.