BACKGROUND:Treadmill testing (TMT) is the most widely used method for evaluating patients with coronary artery disease, predicting the left main coronary artery (LMCA) disease before invasive procedure is very important in risk assessment because of its severe clinical outcome. Lead aVR can be very useful in identifying LMCA obstruction, it is also valuable lead not only in diagnosis but also i...

BACKGROUND In patients with severe aortic stenosis (AS), long-term data tracking surgically induced effects of afterload reduction on reverse LV remodeling are not available. Echocardiographic data is available short term, but in limited fashion beyond one year. Cardiovascular MRI (CMR) offers the ability to serially track changes in LV metrics with small numbers due to its inherent high spatia...

AIMS A variety of antithrombotic regimens have been described for the early postoperative period after bioprosthetic aortic valve replacement (AVR). This study reviews antithrombotic practice for patients undergoing bioprosthetic AVR with or without coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) amongst the centers participating in the ACTION (Anticoagulation Treatment Influence on Postoperative Patients)...

BACKGROUND The incremental cost-effectiveness of transapical transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is ill-defined in high-risk patients where aortic valve replacement (AVR) is an option, and has not been ascertained outside a randomized controlled trial. METHODS We developed a Markov model to examine the progression of patients between health states, defined as peri- and post-procedu...

Transcutaneous aortic valve replacement (AVR) is increasingly used for high-risk patients with severe aortic stenosis, who have high operative mortality for surgical placement during cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). Retrograde transfemoral AVR is usually performed during sedation, whereas antegrade transapical AVR is done with general anesthesia. Both procedures can be carried out without CPB. Ext...

OBJECTIVE To determine the extent to which differences in generic quality of life (QOL) between transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) and surgical aortic valve replacement (AVR) patients explained by EuroSCORE and heart-team operability assessment. METHODS A total of 146 high-risk patients with EuroSCORE > 6 and aged ≥ 75 years underwent TAVI (n = 80) or aortic valve replacement (n =...

OBJECTIVES Minimally invasive aortic valve replacement (Mini-AVR) is a technically advanced procedure. However, it results in equivalent operative mortality, less bleeding and reduced intensive care/hospital stay when compared with conventional AVR. Our aim was to assess the impact of trainee performance on short-term outcomes of patients undergoing elective and urgent Mini-AVR where a signific...

This paper presents an automatic application that provides several retinal image analysis functionalities, namely vessel segmentation, vessel width estimation, artery/vein classification and optic disc segmentation. A pipeline of these methods allows the computation of important vessel related indexes, namely the Central Retinal Arteriolar Equivalent (CRAE), Central Retinal Venular Equivalent (...

We have read the interesting article by Elmistekawy et al. [1], which showed that preoperative haemoglobin (Hb) was an independent predictor of mortality after aortic valve replacement (AVR) [1]. Although the authors defined that anaemia depends on gender and showed no difference in the incidence of preoperative anaemia between both males and females [1], we believe that gender should be consid...

OBJECTIVE To assess the change in peak oxygen consumption (pVO2) and determine its outcome predictors after aortic valve replacement (AVR) for aortic stenosis (AS). METHODS Patients with AS and preserved left ventricular ejection fraction who were referred for single AVR had cardiopulmonary exercise testing prior to and 9 months post-AVR. Predictors of outcome for pVO2 were determined by mult...