July 10, 2013 — Researchers have announced the results of a five-year study that shows early fetal echocardiography provides reliable prenatal diagnosis of major congenital heart disease (CHD). First trimester screening looks very promising for detection of heart problems and increases the need for scheduling early and detailed cardiac evaluations.
“We were excited to find that the accuracy of prenatal cardiac screening was over 95.5 percent in our study,” said Elena Sinkovskaya, RDMS, RDCS, Ph.D., primary investigator and an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Eastern Virginia Medical School.
She and her colleagues analyzed 245 high-risk pregnant patients with prenatal and postnatal ultrasounds. The quality of images provided by the echocardiograms was sufficient to allow for a detailed evaluation of the fetal heart in the large majority of the fetuses scanned.
The study, “Fetal Cardiac Imaging in Early Pregnancy: Analysis of 254 Echocardiograms Performed Between 11+0 and 16+6 Weeks Gestation,” was presented as a poster at the 2013 American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) Annual Scientific Sessions.
For more information: www.asecho.org
May 07, 2026 
