Your Heart in 3D

Professor Roberto Lang, Director of the University of Chicago Noninvasive Cardiac Imaging lab, talks about the wonders of a new “3D Echo” technique.  This new technique allows a surgeon an “unprecedented, accurate” view of the location of the procedure, before he or she begins surgery.

University of Chicago Hospitals

Preparation is an important part of any surgery, and anticipating what a surgeon will see in the operating room is crucial to a procedure’s success. Echocardiography, the use of sound waves to take functional images of the heart, has been a key part of this surgical preparation for decades. With new advances in three-dimensional echocardiography, or “3D Echo,” this role is growing larger and larger, allowing cardiologists to assist surgeons in more exact diagnosis of heart disease and determining the best surgical plan to correct that dysfunction.

“This is progressing very quickly and in many diseases, it really, really changes the way that people think about cardiology,” says Roberto Lang, professor of medicine and the director of the Noninvasive Cardiac Imaging Lab at the University of Chicago Medical Center. “We can look at the heart and tell the surgeon what he or she is going to encounter at the time of surgery.”

At the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in November, Lang and colleagues presented several exciting new uses of 3D Echo to improve surgical procedures and patient outcomes. On Science Life, Lang talks about these new directions for 3D Echo, and features in a video on the procedure filmed earlier this year at the Medical Center.