Three-dimensional printing for device selection in cardiology: Several key points should not be neglected

We comment on the recent developments and problems of three-dimensional printing in cardiology. Since there are currently no standards or consensuses for 3D printing in clinical medicine and the technology is at its infancy in cardiology, it’s very important to detail the procedures to allow more similar studies to further our understandings of this novel technology. Most studies have employed computed tomography to obtain source data for 3D printing, the use of real-time 3D transesophageal echocardiography for data acquisition remains rare, so it would be very valuable and inspiring to detail the image postprocessing steps, or the reliability of the study results will be doubtful.