AIM Transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) is still considered as the reference method for the non-invasive detection of right-to-left shunts. Echocardiographic laboratories are spending most of their time performing TEE studies to exclude a thromboembolic cardiac disease. In a considerable proportion of these patients the question can be simplified to exclude a PFO. Replacing these TEE studies...

BACKGROUND The role of transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) in the evaluation of acute stroke patients is still ill-defined. We conducted a prospective observational study to find the prevalence of TEE findings that indicate anticoagulation as beneficial, in acute ischemic stroke patients without indication for anticoagulation based on clinical, electrocardiographic and transthoracic echocard...

Aims. To evaluate the possible additive effects of beetroot juice plus caffeine on exercise performance. Methods. In a randomized, double-blinded study design, fourteen healthy well-trained men aged 22 ± 3 years performed four trials on different occasions following preexercise ingestion of placebo (PLA), PLA plus 5 mg/kg caffeine (PLA+C), beetroot juice providing 8 mmol of nitrate (BR), and be...

Previously, complete absence of an interatrial septum (IAS) was thought to be a form of an atrioventricular septal defect involving the cleft mitral valve and interventricular communication. Ellis et al. (1) defined this condition as common atrium (CA). This congenital cardiac anomaly is especially observed in association with heterotaxy syndrome. Levy et al. (2) reported a case of complete abs...

We present new results related to the verification of the Timed-Triggered Ethernet (TTE) clock synchronization protocol. This work extends previous verification of TTE based on model checking. We identify a suboptimal design choice in a compression function used in clock synchronization, and propose an improvement. We compare the original design and the improved definition using the SAL model c...

Background Diastolic function is almost exclusively assessed using transthoracic echocardiography (TTE), however velocityencoded phase-contrast imaging permits diastolic evaluation with cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR). However, previous studies have utilized heterogeneous planimetric contour locations to measure mitral valve (MV) inflow velocities and the optimal contour is uncertain. We there...

Dissection of the interventricular septum (IVS) is an extremely rare entity. An institutional echocardiographic database was retrospectively reviewed; 13 patients with a diagnosis of IVS dissection were found and confirmed by cardiac surgery. The purposes of the study were: to determine the value of transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) in establishing the diagnosis of IVS dissection, and to det...

Apurinic/apyrimidinic (AP) sites in DNA are considered to be highly mutagenic and must be corrected to preserve genetic integrity, especially at high temperatures. The gene encoding a homologue of AP exonuclease was cloned from the thermophilic anaerobic bacterium Thermoanaerobacter tengcongensis and transformed into Escherichia coli. The protein product showed high identity (80%) to human Ape1...

PURPOSE To prospectively evaluate diagnostic accuracy of 64-section computed tomography (CT) for evaluation of aortic regurgitation (AR), with transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) as reference. MATERIALS AND METHODS The institutional review board approved this study; written informed consent was obtained. Thirty patients (23 men, seven women; mean age, 56.6 years) with AR underwent TTE and re...