Background First pass myocardial perfusion CMR allows quantification of myocardial blood flow (MBF). MBF estimation with whole-heart tissue response may be useful in a variety of systemic diseases, but can be limited by suboptimal imaging in one or more segments. The interventricular septum (IVS) offers an attractive target for MBF imaging, as it offers higher signal and less partial volume art...

A major challenge in instrumental variables (IV) analysis is to find instruments that are valid, or have no direct effect on the outcome and are ignorable. Typically one is unsure whether all of the putative IVs are in fact valid. We propose a general inference procedure in the presence of invalid IVs, called Two-Stage Hard Thresholding (TSHT) with voting. TSHT uses two hard thresholding steps ...

The aim of this study was to assess urinary bladder histopathology induced by the sling materials tension-free vaginal tape (TVT), vypro mesh, and intravaginal slingplasty (IVS). Thirty rats were studied: sham-operated controls, TVT, vypro, and IVS groups. After laparotomy, a 0.5- "e 1-cm piece of mesh was implanted on the anterior bladder wall. The bladder was examined histopathologically afte...

Abstract Background Echocardiographic reference values for interventricular septal (IVS) thickness (upper limit [URL] 11.2 mm in women vs. 12.4 men), and posterior wall (PW) (URL 11.5 12.3 mm, respectively) exist. According to a European Society of Cardiology position statement, cardiac amyloidosis (CA) should be suspected when left ventricular (LV) is ≥12 at least one red flag present. Given t...

OBJECTIVES This study aimed to evaluate a novel three-dimensional ultrasound (US) guidance system for use in hepatic microwave ablation (MWA). METHODS An in vitro assessment was performed in which users with different degrees of experience were evaluated for accuracy in targeting phantom lesions embedded in agar using US alone, or US in conjunction with the InVision™ System (IVS). An eight-pa...

Recent theoretical studies have shown that conditioning on an instrumental variable (IV), a variable that is associated with exposure but not associated with outcome except through exposure, can increase both bias and variance of exposure effect estimates. Although these findings have obvious implications in cases of known IVs, their meaning remains unclear in the more common scenario where inv...

In this paper, we present an approach for increasing service availability in intelligent video surveillance systems (IVS). A typical IVS system consists of various intelligent video sensors that combine image sensing with video analysis and network streaming. System monitoring and fault diagnosis followed by appropriate system reconfiguration mitigate effects of faults and therefore enhance the...