Increasing the Detection Rate of Normal Fetal Cardiac Structures: A Real-Time Approach

The purpose of this study was to determine if acquiring real-time sweeps of the fetal heart would be a more effective method of identifying normal cardiac structures compared with using static images during routine second-trimester obstetric sonograms. Subjects were scanned using three different techniques. The static image acquisition (protocol A) included three images of the fetal heart. Protocol B used two gray-scale sweeps through the fetal …