junior, was encouraged, provided he could substantiate what he said. Rigid scientific standards had to be maintained and proper evidence provided. 'Opinion' was at once, fairly politely, denounced. A quiet humour added savour to overturgid discussion and Dr McMichael had a constant care for comprehensibility so that no point was missed. ('What exactly do you mean by "C.V.A."? Ah yes, I thought ...

Development of the coronary vascular system is an interesting model in developmental biology with major implications for the clinical setting. Although coronary vessel development is a form of vasculogenesis followed by angiogenesis, this system uses several unique developmental processes not observed in the formation of other blood vessels. This review summarizes the literature that describes ...

TO THE EDITOR: In an effort to maximize the utility of the thallium scan, the subject of the reinjection of thallium has become an issue of recent concern (1). The rationale of the reinjection procedure is the observation that a stress/reinjection comparison does a better job of identifying viable myocardium than a stress/redistribution scan. Some authors propose performing stress/redistributio...

In this paper, we propose a physics-based model to segment and reconstruct coronary vessels from biplane angiograms. We use the snake technique to model the vessel, the snake deforms in space to adjust its projections to the image data. In this way, segmentation and 3 0 reconstruction are unified into the same procedure assuring that only plausible vessel shapes will be detected. The method is ...

This review article is aimed at comparing the results of histopathological and clinical imaging studies to assess coronary collateral circulation in humans. The role of collaterals, as emerging from morphological studies in both normal and atherosclerotic coronary vessels, is described; in addition, present role and future perpectives of echocardiographic techniques in assessing collateral circ...

Multislice computed tomographic coronary angiography (MSCT) can accurately detect the presence of atherosclerosis noninvasively. However, a discrepancy has been observed between MSCT and noninvasive functional imaging. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the correlation between MSCT and invasive fractional flow reserve (FFR) in men with known coronary artery disease. Thirty-three p...

The effect of nitroprusside on regional myocardial specific blood flow (RMBF) was evaluated in 25 patients with the xenon-133 washout technique. Six patients were normal (group 1), six patients had coronary artery disease without collateral vessels (group 2), and thirteen patients had coronary artery disease with collateral vessels (group 3). In group 1, RMBF was unchanged following nitroprussi...

percutaneous coronary angioplasty (ptca) of a coronary stenosis without documented ischemia at noninvasive stress testing is often performed, but its benefit is unproven. coronary pressure– derived fractional flow reserve (ffr) is an invasive index of stenosis severity defined as the ratio of maximal blood pressure in a stenotic vessel to the normal maximal pressure in the same vessel. ffr is a...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to determine the feasibility of coronary flow velocity reserve (CFVR) measurement by transthoracic Doppler echocardiography (TTDE) in children with Kawasaki disease (KD). BACKGROUND Doppler-derived CFVR is a reliable marker predicting the presence of myocardial ischemia. METHODS We studied 49 patients (median age 11 years) with KD. The CFVR was calcu...

BACKGROUND The process of progression in coronary artery disease is unknown. METHODS AND RESULTS The subjects were 36 patients with 36 objective vessels with clinically significant progression of coronary artery disease (>/=15% per year) in whom 4 serial coronary arteriograms (CAGs) were performed at intervals of approximately 4 months in a 1-year period. The degree of progression of percent ...