A growing number of exciting animal and preclinical studies are beginning to reveal the immense potential in stem cell–based therapies, particularly in the area of treating cardiovascular diseases. However, to evaluate the efficacy of these treatments in clinical trials, the transplanted stem cells must be monitored quantitatively and qualitatively in vivo. To date, several noninvasive imaging ...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW Inflammation is a key player in a wide range of cardiovascular and myocardial diseases. Given the numerous implications of inflammatory processes in disease initiation and progression, functional imaging modalities including positron emission tomography (PET) represent valuable diagnostic, prognostic, and monitoring tools in patient management. Since increased glucose metaboli...

Estimation of left ventricular (LV) mass has both prognostic and therapeutic value independent of traditional risk factors. Unfortunately, LV mass evaluation has been underestimated in clinical practice. Assessment of LV mass can be performed by a number of imaging modalities. Despite inherent limitations, conventional echocardiography has fundamentally been established as most widely used diag...

a I A e s t c c c h c p a v a m c c w w c c 1 f t n t r s m p q i n a a omputed tomography (CT) was developed or medical diagnosis more than a decade efore the introduction of magnetic resonance MR) imaging. Contrast media for CT and R imaging have identical tissue distribution nd plasma kinetics. So the story of the early istory of contrast media for cardiac magnetic esonance (CMR) actually st...

background pulmonary artery hypertension is the presentation of various types of cardiovascular and systematic diseases. there are different kinds of noninvasive methods to determine right ventricular function, pulmonary artery pressure, and effect of pulmonary hypertension on right ventricular function. these methods include the tissue doppler imaging (tdi) of the tricuspid annulus and the lon...

Cardiac resynchronization therapy improves clinical symptoms and prognosis of heart failure patients. However, it has been shown that up to 40% of patients do not respond to this therapy. Three main determinants of cardiac resynchronization therapy response have been identified: left ventricular dyssynchrony, left ventricular lead position, and extent and location of myocardial scar tissue. Two...

Background Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a highly advanced and sophisticated imaging modality for cardiac motion assessment and quantitative analysis. The myocardial tagging techniques have seen wide applications for cardiac deformation analysis (see [1-4] for example). Among different image post-processing techniques, frequency-based methods have played an important role in analysis of h...

The non-invasive study of cardiac mechanics has been improved after the recent introduction of advanced magnetic resonance and echocardiographic imaging techniques. Tagged and diffusion-sensitive cardiac magnetic resonance allows the study of myocardial torsion dynamics as well as the anatomical disposition of myocardial fibers. Local myocardial strain and synchronicity of myocardial contractio...