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Institute
Introduction: Speckle-tracking echocardiography has recently emerged as a quantitative ultrasound technique for accurately evaluating myocardial function by analyzing the motion of speckles identified. Speckle-tracking obtained under stress may offer an opportunity to improve the detection of dynamic regional abnormalities and myocardial viability.
Objective: To evaluate stress speckle tracking as tool to detect myocardial viability in comparison to cardiac MRI in post-STEMI patients.
Methods: 49 patients were prospectively enrolled in our 18-month’s study. Dobutamin stress echocardiography was performed 4 days post-infarction accompanied with automated functional imaging (Speckle tracking) analysis of left ventricle during rest and then during low dose stress. All patients underwent a follow up stress echocardiography at 6 weeks with speckle tracking analysis. Cardiac MRI took place concomitantly at 4 days post-infarction and 6 weeks. We carried out an assessment of re-admission with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) after one year of enrollment.
Results: Investigating strain rate obtained with stress speckle tracking after revascularization predicted the extent of myocardial scar, determined by contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging. A good correlation was found between the global strain and total infarct size (R 0.75, p< 0.001). Furthermore, a clear inverse relationship was found between the segmental strain and the transmural extent of infarction in each segment. (R -0.69, p<0.01). Meanwhile it provided 81.82% sensitivity and 82.6% specificity to detect transmural from non-transmural infarction at a cut-off value of -10.15. Global stress strain rate showed 80% sensitivity and 77.5% specificity at a cut-off value of -9.1 to predict hospital re-admission with ACS. A cut-off value of -8.4 had shown a 69.23% sensitivity and 73.5% specificity to predict the re-admission related to other cardiac symptoms.
Conclusion: Strain rate obtained from speckle tracking during stress is a novel method of detecting myocardial viability after STEMI .Moreover it carries a promising role in post-myocardial infarction risk stratification with a reasonable prediction of reversible cardiac-related hospital re-admission.
The aim of this study was to provide a comprehensive overview of the frontal bone in the forensic context with special emphasis on its shape. Analyses on 19th and 20th century Euro-American and German crania were performed in terms of population differences, sexual dimorphism, secular change, and metopism.
It could clearly be seen that the frontal bone on its own already provides a lot of information toward the biological profile of an individual. Overall, using size and shape combined for analyses would always produce the best results, followed by shape only and then size only. Nevertheless, Log_Centroid_Size was the best sex-discriminating variable in the size-shape combined analyses for both populations. Population differences as well as sexual dimorphism could both be assessed (with varying accuracy) using size only and shape only respectively.
Very little secular change between the 19th and 20th century was found for the frontal in both groups respectively, with the secular change that could be seen mostly being shape variation.
Metopism analysis was only performed on German crania, because the presence or absence of a metopic suture was not documented for the Euro-American crania. Unfortunately, the results of these analyses were very limited due to too small sample sizes for the overall low percentage of metopism. The metopic frontal was once again found to be short in relation to its width and presenting a more rounded frontal curvature. The attempt of creating a formula to morphometrically assess the presence of metopism was not successful.
The results of this thesis suggest that forensic case work on skeletal remains would greatly benefit from a broader application of Geometric Morphometrics and consequently from larger databases containing shape data as well as more advanced and user-friendly software for this type of analyses.
Introduction: Speckle-tracking echocardiography has recently emerged as a quantitative ultrasound technique for accurately evaluating myocardial function by analyzing the motion of speckles identified. Speckle-tracking obtained under stress may offer an opportunity to improve the detection of dynamic regional abnormalities and myocardial viability.
Objective: To evaluate stress speckle tracking as tool to detect myocardial viability in comparison to cardiac MRI in post-STEMI patients.
Methods: 49 patients were prospectively enrolled in our 18-month’s study. Dobutamin stress echocardiography was performed 4 days post-infarction accompanied with automated functional imaging (Speckle tracking) analysis of left ventricle during rest and then during low dose stress. All patients underwent a follow up stress echocardiography at 6 weeks with speckle tracking analysis. Cardiac MRI took place concomitantly at 4 days post-infarction and 6 weeks. We carried out an assessment of re-admission with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) after one year of enrollment.
Results: Investigating strain rate obtained with stress speckle tracking after revascularization predicted the extent of myocardial scar, determined by contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging. A good correlation was found between the global strain and total infarct size (R 0.75, p< 0.001). Furthermore, a clear inverse relationship was found between the segmental strain and the transmural extent of infarction in each segment. (R -0.69, p<0.01). Meanwhile it provided 81.82% sensitivity and 82.6% specificity to detect transmural from non-transmural infarction at a cut-off value of -10.15. Global stress strain rate showed 80% sensitivity and 77.5% specificity at a cut-off value of -9.1 to predict hospital re-admission with ACS. A cut-off value of -8.4 had shown a 69.23% sensitivity and 73.5% specificity to predict the re-admission related to other cardiac symptoms.
Conclusion: Strain rate obtained from speckle tracking during stress is a novel method of detecting myocardial viability after STEMI .Moreover it carries a promising role in post-myocardial infarction risk stratification with a reasonable prediction of reversible cardiac-related hospital re-admission.
BACKGROUND. Prostate cancer (PCa) remains a major health concern in men of the Western World. However, we still lack effective diagnostic tools a) for an effective screening with both high sensitivity and specificity, b) to guide biopsies and avoid histology sampling errors and c) to predict tumor aggressiveness in order to avoid overtreatment. Therefore, a more reliable, highly cancer-specific and ideally in vivo approach is needed. The present study has been designed in order to further develop and test the method of "metabolomic imaging" using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) at 7T to address those challenges.
METHODS. Thirty whole prostates with biopsy-proven PCa were in vitro analyzed with a 7T human MR scanner. A voxel grid containing the spectral information was overlaid with the MR image of the middle transverse cross-sectional plane of each case. Subsequent histopathological evaluation of the prostate specimen followed. After the spectral output was processed, all voxels were compared with a metabolomic PCa profile, which had been established within a preliminary study, in order to create a metabolomic map indicating MRS cancer-suspicious regions. Those regions were compared with the histologically identified tumor lesions regarding location.
RESULTS. Sixty-one percent of the histological cancer lesions were detected by metabolomic imaging. Among the cases with PCa on the examined slice, 75% were identified as cancerous. None of the tested features significantly differed between detected and undetected cancer lesions. A defined "Malignancy Index" (MI) significantly differentiated between MRS-suspicious lesions corresponding with a histological cancer lesion and benign lesions (p = 0.006) with an overall accuracy of 70%. The MI furthermore showed a positive correlation with the Gleason grade (p = 0.021).
CONCLUSION. A new approach within PCa diagnostics was developed with spectral analysis including the whole measureable metabolome - referred to as "metabolomics" - rather than focusing on single metabolites. The MI facilitates precise tumor detection and may additionally serve as a marker for tumor aggressiveness. Metabolomic imaging might contribute to a highly cancer-specific in vivo diagnostic protocol for PCa.