BACKGROUND Left ventricular (LV) longitudinal systolic dysfunction has been identified even in asymptomatic patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) and preserved LV ejection fraction (LVEF). However, its relevant clinical features have not been fully evaluated. METHODS We studied 144 asymptomatic DM patients without coronary artery disease. Their mean age was 57 ± 15 years, 79 (55%) were female,...

BACKGROUND Different aspects of acute stroke management and strategies for stroke prevention derive from two viewpoints: specific traditional and historical backgrounds and evidence-based medicine from modern randomized controlled trials (RCTs), meta-analysis and authorized clinical practice guidelines (GLs). Regarding intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), Cerebrovascular Diseases published the 2006 ...

PURPOSES We investigated whether patients with organ-confined prostate cancer (PCa) and positive surgical margins (SMs) had a similar biochemical recurrence (BCR) risk compared with patients with pT3a and preoperative prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels ≤ 10ng/ml. Furthermore, we examined the effects of incorporating SM status, Gleason score (Gls), and preoperative PSA level into the discrim...

Ng et al. [1] reported the results of a very interesting study on sepsis-induced myocardial dysfunction. The authors elegantly matched patients with septic shock (90-day mortality of 41.9 %) with a control group of patients with sepsis (90-day mortality of 0 %) using a relatively novel and more sophisticated echocardiographic approach for the diagnosis of myocardial dysfunction in septic patien...

Metabolic reprogramming has been described as a hallmark of transformed cancer cells. In this study, we examined the role of the glutamine (Gln) utilization pathway in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cell lines and primary AML samples. Our results indicate that a subset of AML cell lines is sensitive to Gln deprivation. Glutaminase (GLS) is a mitochondrial enzyme that catalyzes the conversion of G...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether performing an assessment of myocardial deformation using speckle tracking imaging during the recovery period after dobutamine stress echocardiography (DSE) allows detection of significant coronary artery disease (CAD) in patients with chest discomfort. METHODS DSE and coronary angiography were performed in 44 patients with chest dis...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to apply speckle tracking imaging (STI) to evaluate rabbit sepsis induced myocardial injury. MATERIALS AND METHODS Rabbits were injected with the endotoxin lipopolysaccharide (LPS). before and 2h, 4h, 6h, 8h, 12h after the injection of LPS, conventional echocardiography and STI were performed to measure left ventricular end diastolic diameter (LVDd), end-sy...

The ideal edges of bilayer graphene (BLG) are that the edges of the top and bottom graphene layers (GLs) of BLG are well-aligned. Actually, the alignment distance between the edges of the top and bottom GLs of a real BLG can be as large as the submicrometer scale or as small as zero, which cannot be distinguished using an optical microscope. Here, we present a detailed Raman study on BLG at its...

BACKGROUND Newer 2D strain software has a potential to assess layer-specific strain. However, normal reference values for layer-specific strain have not been established. We aimed to establish the normal ranges of layer-specific longitudinal and circumferential strain (endocardial global longitudinal strain (GLS), transmural GLS, epicardial GLS, endocardial global circumferential strain (GCS), ...

In this paper, an accurate Image Registration method is presented. It combines a feature-based method, which allows to recover large motion magnitudes between images, with a Generalized Least-Squares (GLS) motion estimation technique which is able to estimate motion parameters in an accurate manner. The feature-based method gives an initial estimation of the motion parameters, which will be ref...