In 2007 The Netherlands Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (Nederlandse Vereniging voor Thoraxchirurgie, NVT) instituted the Adult Cardiac Surgery Database. The dataset comprises demographic factors, type of intervention, in-hospital mortality and 18 risk factors for mortality after cardiac surgery, according to the European System for Cardiac Operative Risk Evaluation definitions. Current...

The surgical strategy in patients with myasthenia gravis (MG) is influenced by the suspicion of thymoma based on mediastinal imaging. Aim of this retrospective study was to analyse the accuracy of CT of the mediastinum in predicting the histological findings in patients with MG referred for thymectomy. Thirty-four CT-scans of MG patients referred for thymectomy between October 1989 and October ...

The Audit and Guidelines Committee of the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery recently published a guideline on antiplatelet and anticoagulation management in cardiac surgery. We aimed to assess the awareness of the current guideline and adherence to it in the National Health Service through this National Audit. We designed a questionnaire consisting of nine questions covering vari...

Complex lesions of the thoracic aorta are traditionally treated in 2 surgical steps with the elephant trunk technique. A relatively new approach is the frozen elephant trunk (FET) technique, which potentially allows combined lesions of the thoracic aorta to be treated in a 1-stage procedure combining endovascular treatment with conventional surgery using a hybrid prosthesis. These are very comp...

As an important scan plane, four chamber view is routinely performed in both second trimester perinatal screening and fetal echocardiographic examinations. The biometrics this plane including cardio-thoracic ratio (CTR) cardiac axis are usually measured by sonographers for diagnosing congenital heart disease. However, due to the commonly existing artifacts like acoustic shadowing, traditional m...