LAUSR

Attempting a comprehensive examination of the fetal heart remains challenging for unexperienced operators as it emphasizes the acquisition and documentation of sequential cross‐sectional and sagittal views and inevitably results in diminished detection rates of fetuses affected by congenital heart disease. The introduction of four‐dimensional spatio‐temporal image correlation (4D STIC) technology facilitated a volumetric approach for thorough cardiac anatomic evaluation by the acquisition of cardiac 4D datasets. By analyzing and re‐arranging of numerous frames according to their temporal event within the heart cycle, STIC allows visualization of cardiac structures as an endless cine loop sequence of a complete single cardiac cycle in motion. However, post‐analysis with manipulation and repeated slicing of the volume usually requires experience and in‐depth anatomic knowledge, which limits the widespread application of this advanced technique in clinical care and unfortunately leads to the underestimation of its diagnostic value to date. Fetal intelligent navigation echocardiography (FINE), a novel method that automatically generates and displays nine standard fetal echocardiographic views in normal hearts, has shown to be able to overcome these limitations. Very recent data on the detection of congenital heart defects (CHDs) using the FINE method revealed a high sensitivity and specificity of 98% and 93%, respectively.