Although infective endocarditis is primarily treated conservatively with antimicrobial therapy, early surgical intervention is often mandatory when various complications arise. These include intractable heart failure, persistent uncontrollable infection, large mobile vegetations, peripheral embolism and prosthetic valve endocarditis. Optimal timing of surgical intervention in patients with infe...

Bartonella quintana endocarditis, a common cause of culture-negative endocarditis in adults, has rarely been reported in children. We describe 5 patients 7-16 years of age from Ethiopia with heart defects and endocarditis; 4 cases were caused by infection with B. quintana and 1 by Bartonella of undetermined species. All 5 patients were afebrile and oligosymptomatic, although 3 had heart failure...

Superior vena cava (SVC) syndrome is a known but rare complication of pacemaker lead implantation, accounting for approximately less than 0.5% of cases. Its pathophysiology is due to either infection or endothelial mechanical stress, causing inflammation and fibrosis leading to thrombosis, and therefore stenosis of the SVC. Due to the various risks including thrombo-embolic complications and th...

The activity of trovafloxacin was compared with those of vancomycin and penicillin in a model of Streptococcus sanguis species group (trovafloxacin MIC, 0.125 microg/ml) and Streptococcus mitis species group (trovafloxacin MIC, 0.125 microg/ml) experimental endocarditis. Rabbits with catheter-induced aortic valve vegetations were given no treatment, trovafloxacin at 15 mg/kg of body weight thre...

Texture segmentation via wavelet transform traditionally adopts textural features based approach. However, applying this method can lead to oversegmentation problems. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new scheme of texture segmentation. The proposed approach will be applied to remotely sensed images for vegetation extraction. The key idea is that we precede wavelet transform by a prelim...