OBJECTIVE To highlight the usefulness of apixaban on intra-atrial thrombus that develops after previous treatment with warfarin. CLINICAL PRESENTATION AND INTERVENTION A 69-year-old woman with a history of atrial fibrillation treated with warfarin presented with acute decompensated heart failure due to an episode of atrial fibrillation. Transesophageal echocardiogram revealed the presence of ...

A 39-year-old woman underwent uneventful percutaneous occlusion of an ostium secundum atrial septal defect (ASD) with a 22 mm Ultrasept ASD Occluder®. Transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) performed two years after implantation revealed a de novo residual left-to-right shunt through the correctly implanted device. Three-dimensional transesophageal echocardiography (3D TEE) further clarified th...

BACKGROUND We report a patient who underwent percutaneous transesophageal gastrotubing (PTEG), that is, nonsurgical esophagostomy under ultrasonographic control, as an alternative to percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG). CASE DESCRIPTION The PTEG was placed for shunt protection from inadvertent infection in a 29-year-old male patient in whom a ventriculoperitoneal (VP) shunt had previous...

The patient is a 54-year-old asymptomatic male with a tumor in the right atrium that was diagnosed on transesophageal echocardiography and confirmed as a lipoma of the right atrium on computerized tomography. The patient underwent surgical repair with extracorporeal circulation. The tumor was resected, and its base of implantation in the atrium was repaired with a flap of bovine pericardium. Th...

This paper presents a semi-automatic method for tracking the mitral valve leaflet in transesophageal echocardiography. The algorithm requires a manual initialization and then segments an image sequence. The use of two constrained active contours and curve fitting techniques results in a fast segmentation algorithm. The active contours successfully track the inner cardiac muscle and the mitral v...

An asymptomatic patient was discovered to have a large right atrial myxoma by transthoracic echocardiography. Preoperative considerations included the possibility of satellite lesions, left atrial origin, and a question of tricuspid valve involvement. Subsequent operative transesophageal echocardiography demonstrated single-stalk attachment in the right atrial septal wall and no satellite lesio...

With its unique en face view, real time three-dimensional transesophageal echocardiography has been reported to be more precise than conventional two-dimensional studies in evaluating mitral regurgitation etiology, and can locate diseased segments correctly. We present a case with severe mitral regurgitation due to anterior mitral leaflet perforation. Intraoperative real time three-dimensional ...

Mitral Valve Aneurysm (MVA) is rarely reported and occurs most in association with infective endocarditis of the aortic valve. In our case, the 46-yr-old Chinese man was referred to our hospital with dyspnea and orthopnea. Transesophageal echocardiography during operation revealed a localized, thin-walled saccular structure in the anterior leaflet that bulged into the left atrium, and severe mi...