To assist the diagnosis and analysis of heart disease, we introduce a template matching based method to detect the apical four-chamber (A4C) image plane in the three-dimensional echocardiographic (3DE) dataset. Firstly, a typical A4C image is selected as the template. Secondly, a series of cross-sections are extracted from a 3DE image. Finally, by a histogram-based retrieval, the cross-section most similar to the template is retrieved as the A4C image in this 3DE image. With low computational complexity and easy implementation, this method can detect the A4C image plane in 3DE images of different subjects by only one template image.