Despite the dramatic improvement in the quality of diagnostic ultrasound Congenital Heart Disease
(CHD) are the most common and less frequently diagnosed prenatally anomalies. This is mainly secondary to the
difficulties in training expert and dedicated sonographer in the study of fetal heart. Four dimensional (4D)
sonography may overcome operator dependency allowing offline 4D examination of the fetal heart. This
approach opens the possibility of performing a virtual echocardiography in fetuses at high risk or suspected to be
affected by a CHD through networking capabilities. As a consequence virtual echocardiography may allow to
extend the benefit of advanced of cardiac examination in patients followed in peripheral centers thus reducing the
number of unnecessary referral to tertiary centers.
Keywords: Congenital Heart Disease, Screening, 4D Echocardiography, Spatiotemporal Image Correlation (stic),
virtual Echocardiography. Virtual Reality.
