Imaging and Radiation Research (2022) Volume 5 Issue 1 doi:10.24294/irr.v5i1.1748 53 Review Article 3D ultrasound in cardiology Antonio J Bravo 1 *, Miguel Vera 2,3 , Delia Madriz 4 , Julio Contreras-Velásquez 3 , José Chacón 2 , Sandra Wilch- es-Durán 2 , Modesto Graterol-Rivas 2 , Daniela Riaño-Wilches 6 , Joselyn Rojas 5 , Valmore Bermúdez 7 1* Coordinación de Investigación Industrial, Decanato de Investigación, Universidad Nacional Experimental del Táchira, Táchira, Venezuela. E-mail: abravo@unet.edu.ve 2 Grupo de Investigación Altos Estudios de Frontera (ALEF), Universidad Simón Bolívar, Cúcuta, Colombia. 3 Grupo de Investigación en Procesamiento Computacional de Datos (GIPCD-ULA) Universidad de Los Andes-Táchira, Venezuela. 4 Programa Calidad y Productividad Organizacional, Decanato de Investigación, Universidad Nacional Experimental del Táchira, Táchira, Venezuela. 5 Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Department, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. 6 Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia. 7 Centro de Investigaciones Endocrino-Metabólicas “Dr. Félix Gómez” Facultad de Medicina, Universidad del Zulia, Venezuela. ABSTRACT Cardiovascular imaging analysis is a useful tool for the diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of cardiovascular dis- eases. Imaging techniques allow non-invasive quantitative assessment of cardiac function, providing morphological, functional and dynamic information. Recent technological advances in ultrasound have made it possible to improve the quality of patient treatment, thanks to the use of modern image processing and analysis techniques. However, the acqui- sition of these dynamic three-dimensional (3D) images leads to the production of large volumes of data to process, from which cardiac structures must be extracted and analyzed during the cardiac cycle. Extraction, three-dimensional visual- ization, and qualification tools are currently used within the clinical routine, but unfortunately require significant inter- action with the physician. These elements justify the development of new efficient and robust algorithms for structure extraction and cardiac motion estimation from three-dimensional images. As a result, making available to clinicians new means to accurately assess cardiac anatomy and function from three-dimensional images represents a definite advance in the investigation of a complete description of the heart from a single examination. The aim of this article is to show what advances have been made in 3D cardiac imaging by ultrasound and additionally to observe which areas have been studied under this imaging modality. Keywords: Ultrasound; Acquisition; Visualization; Processing; Reconstruction; Cardiology ARTICLE INFO Received: 20 February 2022 Accepted: 1 April 2022 Available online: 6 April 2022 COPYRIGHT Copyright © 2022 by author(s). Imaging and Radiation Research is published by En- Press Publisher LLC. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 1. Introduction In the last three decades, the construction and visualiza- tion of three-dimensional images from ultrasound data has been a topic of interest for a large group of researchers inspired, ba- sically, by the fact that 3D ultrasound (US) allows visualization of image planes that are not accessible in 2D ultrasound [1] . Ultrasound images are essentially a measure of the acous- tic response of an impulse at a particular frequency. For high frequencies around 15 MHz, very good resolution is ob- tained, but the scan is only a few centimeters deep, while for