Herz
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The ultimate goal of any imaging technique for the investigation of the anatomy of the beating heart is a 3D-display of the cardiac morphology throughout a complete heart cycle. The reason for this interest is quite clear: 3D-imaging has the potential for a better understanding of the individual morphology under normal and pathological conditions and especially, if complex therapeutic decisions have to been made. In the clinical practice, the echocardiographer attempts to obtain a spatial information by a mental reassembling of the 2D echocardiographic images, that are obtained from different imaging planes. ⋯ The process of 3D-reconstruction is a sequence of repeated steps of image processing. The first step is the elimination of a problem, that is common to all image reconstruction techniques from tomographic information: the imaging planes are recorded at different time points, and mostly under varying conditions. Although several gating techniques are implemented into the image acquisition, some variability is unavoidable, simply because neither the heart nor the surroundings can be frozen during image acquisition.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)