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Ultrasound imaging of the human heart has undergone revolutionary changes along with recent strides in computing power. Since the wider acceptance of two dimensional (2D) echocardiography in the 1970s, progress in this field had slowed to some extent. However, the quest for three dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging of the heart began in the early 1960s when Baum and Greenwood introduced the concept by imaging the orbit using a series of parallel slices. w1 It was not until 1974, when Dekker and colleagues sought to construct a 3D model of the heart using a mechanical spatial locator, 1 that the concept became more realistic. Their model was limited to an open chest with fixed point imaging, requiring all the desired images to be obtained from one locationdan extremely slow and primitive process suitable only for research. In 1986 Martin and colleaguesw2 used a micromanipulator controlled …