Methodological research in echocardiographic measurements of right ventricular volume:compared with cardiac magnetic resonance

Abstract

Objective To evaluate the accuracy of methods in echocardiographic measurements of right ventricular (RV) volume.Methods Forty-six healthy volunteers were examined by two dimensional echocardiography (2-DE),real time three-dimensional echocardiography (RT-3DE) and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (cMRI) within 24 hours.2 DE adopts three methods to measure RV volume,the first is Simpson,the second is the half ellipsoid method,and the last is biplane area-length method.In RT 3DE,RV volume were calculated respectively by tri-plane method and TomTec 4D RV-function CAP software.In cMRI,RV volume was calculated by Argus software.Right ventricular end diastolic and end-systolic volume (RVEDV,RVESV) were measured respectively.Then the echo measurement were compared to cMRI.Consistency of two methods was evaluated by Bland-Altman analysis.Results ①As compared to cMRI,Simpson,the half ellipsoid method and tri-plane method underestimated RV volume,with statistical significance(P ＜0.05).Biplane area-length method and TomTec 4D RV-Function CAP had no significant statistical difference (P ＞ 0.05).② The result of correlation analysis was as follows:RV volumes from Simpson and tri-plane method had bad correlation with those from cMRI (r =0.3-0.4).RV volumes from TomTec,half ellipsoid method and biplane area length method correlated highly with those from cMRI(r =0.7-0.8).③The Bland-Altman analysis of echo methods with cMRI showed that each measurement by TomTec and biplane area-length method had a smaller limit of the agreement and a smaller difference average.Conclusions Tom-Tec 4D RV-Function CAP in RT-3DE and biplane area length method in 2-DE can measure RV volumes accurately. Key words: Echocardiography; Right ventricular volume ; Magnetic resonance imaging