TEE, 3D- und interventionelle Echokardiographie

Since its first more experimental applications in the late 1970s and early 1980s, transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) has become an essential modality in cardiac imaging as a result of its advantage of an almost unobstructed ultrasound window and a variety of technical developments. This article describes the evolution of TEE and the defining contributions of German cardiologists in this subfield of echocardiography over the past decades, from monoplane TEE to peri-interventional monitoring using three-dimensional (3D) TEE.