Professor Special Lecture: 153rd Regular Meeting of the Medical Society of Toho University: Assessment of Fetal Cardiac Function and Development of a Novel Technique

Fetal circulatory physiology differs from that of the neonate. A concept of biventricular combined cardiac outputs is necessary to understand and assess the fetal cardiac function. Fetal cardiac function has been estimated using echocardiographic methods such as M-mode, B-mode, color flow mapping, and pulsed wave Doppler. In addition, recent studies have reported the utility of tissue Doppler imaging in fetal echocardiography. However, established parameters for fetal cardiac function remain to be unresolved. Table 1 shows variables which have been reported in the literature and used in clinical studies in these days. Therefore, we developed two novel techniques to assess fetal cardiac function; one is automatic fractional shortening method, the other is E/e' by dual gate Doppler methods. These two techniques are expected to be reliable and useful methods to assess fetal pathological status in various conditions.