Comparison of Cardiac MR and 3D Echocardiography Left Ventricular Analysis

Both cardiac MR (CMR) and real-time 3D echocardiography (3DE) are used to assess left ventricular function. Patients may benefit when results from both examinations can be directly compared to each other. Results in literature suggest an overall agreement, but are not specific on a patient-to-patient base. In order to determine the intrinsic variability of both methods, multiple analyses of multiple datasets of both techniques were performed on two healthy subjects. Conformity was checked on the basis of acquisition technique, user interaction and postprocessing software package. In addition, findings were checked by including 20 patients that underwent 3DE and CMR examinations. Results show CMR software packages to be very precise (high reproducibility; better than 4%) in contrast with 3DE packages (at least 7%). Left ventricular volumes appear to be dissimilar in CMR and 3DE, suggesting that at least one of the modalities produces inaccurate volumes. Both in the repeated measurements in healthy subjects and in the patient group it appeared impossible to directly relate left ventricular volumes from CMR and 3DE examinations.