The diagnosis and prognostic assessment of patients with suspected or known cardiac disease has become increasingly dependent upon the use of noninvasive cardiac imaging technologies. Two of these are well established, echocardiography and nuclear cardiology, and two are relatively recent, cardiac CT and cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR). Cardiac CT provides high-resolution images of the coronar...

Background Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a common cause of heart failure (HF) and the most common diagnosis in patients referred for cardiac transplantation. Genetic studies in DCM have identified mutations in over 30 genes. To date, there is only scarce data regarding the interdependencies between the various genotypes and their impact on cardiac morphology and myocardial tissue appearance. ...

AIMS The prognostic implications of QRS duration and morphology in heart failure patients treated with cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) remains debated. The present evaluation investigated the association between QRS duration (<150 vs. ≥150 ms) and QRS morphology (left bundle brand block [LBBB] vs. non-LBBB) and long-term prognosis of a large cohort of unselected heart failure patients t...

A strategy is developed to facilitate quantitative analysis of left ventricle morphology based on clinically measured surface geometry and muscle fiber patterns rather than lower order geometric approximations previously required. A transfer function is derived which maps measured three-dimensional ventricle surfaces and associated muscle fiber patterns to a right circular cylinder, while prese...

THE LEFT ATRIAL APPENDAGE (LAA) IS ONE OF THE MAJOR SITES OF CARDIAC THROMBUS FORMATION. Recently, a large retrospective study found a relationship between specific types of LAA morphology and earlier thromboembolic events by means of computed tomography (CT) and cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR). In particular, minor events were seen in chicken wing LAA morphology. CT and CMR are unfavorable in...

This study adds the dimension of a T-wave morphology composite score (MCS) to the QTc interval-based evaluation of drugs that affect cardiac repolarization. Electrocardiographic recordings from 62 subjects on placebo and 400 mg moxifloxacin were compared with those from 21 subjects on 160 and 320 mg D,L-sotalol. T-wave morphology changes, as assessed by DeltaMCS, are larger after 320 mg D,L-sot...

During heart morphogenesis, cardiac chambers arise by differential expansion of regions of the primitive cardiac tube. This process is under the control of specific transcription factors such as Tbx5 and dHAND. To gain insight into the cellular mechanisms that underlie cardiogenesis, we have used a retrospective clonal approach based on the spontaneous recombination of an nlaacZ reporter gene t...

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An appreciation of the extraordinarily rich dynamics of cardiac arrhythmias can be obtained from examination of any text in electrocardiography. Typically, there are a large number (100 or more) of rhythms that are identified on the basis of changes outside of normal limits of rhythm and wave morphology in the electrocardiogram.’*’ The point of this paper is to show that mathematics can provide...