BACKGROUND Although the internal thoracic artery was proven superior to saphenous vein graft in long-term patency, it is thought to be a more resistive conduit than the vein graft. Moreover, patency studies comparing both left and right internal thoracic arteries have provided results favoring the former. Fractional flow reserve is an established functional index of coronary blood flow. METHO...

Nowadays, transient analysis of electromagnetic systems is widely adopted as a virtual prototyping tool in the design electrical and electronic devices. Time domain (TD) methods for solutions Maxwell’s equations represent most obvious approach to tackling this type problem. Frequency (FD) techniques are also commonly used return TD response through inverse Fourier transform. This suffers from n...

OBJECTIVE The studies showing the superior characteristics of ITA graft and its impact on the clinical results of coronary artery surgery were performed with ITA harvested almost exclusively as a pedicle. This study assesses the impact of ITA skeletonization on its innervation and reactivity. METHODS Segments of skeletonized and non-skeletonized ITA were stained with antibodies against protei...

The current trend in coronary artery surgery is to revascularize the left coronary artery branches with bilateral internal thoracic arteries (ITA). For this procedure, the right ITA is usually grafted to the left anterior descending coronary artery while the circumflex coronary artery is revascularized by the left ITA. The mid to long-term results of the left ITA on the circumflex system were e...

BACKGROUND The internal thoracic artery (ITA) is a descendant branch of the subclavian artery. The former is located bilaterally in both internal sides of the thorax near the sternum and is accompanied by two internal thoracic veins (ITV). From a practical point of view, the ITA (and the ITV) identification is important because these vessels can be injured when pericardiocentesis with the paras...

Inferior thoracic aperture (ITA) is a 3D closed contour near the periphery of the diaphragm and the accurate detection of ITA from CT images has many important applications. However, it is very difficult to identify certain parts of the ITA from CT images due to the properties of adjacent anatomic structures and image noise. In this paper, we develop a new method to detect the full ITA contour ...

We introduce the class of Interrupt Timed Automata (ITA), a subclass of hybrid automata well suited to the description of timed multi-task systems with interruptions in a single processor environment. While the reachability problem is undecidable for hybrid automata we show that it is decidable for ITA. More precisely we prove that the untimed language of an ITA is regular, by building a finite...