Mesothelia in the adult vertebrate are the simple squamous epithelia covering all coelomic organs and body cavities. Until recently, analysis of the generation and differentiative potential of mesothelia in organogenesis has largely focused on development of visceral mesothelium of the heart; the epicardium and its progenitor, the proepicardium. Here, we review emerging data on the development ...

The hearts of lower vertebrates such as fish and salamanders display scarless regeneration following injury, although this feature is lost in adult mammals. The remarkable capacity of the neonatal mammalian heart to regenerate suggests that the underlying machinery required for the regenerative process is evolutionarily retained. Recent studies highlight the epicardial covering of the heart as ...

Despite the extensive use of zebrafish as a model organism in developmental biology and regeneration research, genetic techniques enabling conditional analysis of gene function are limited. In this study, we generated Zwitch, a Cre-dependent invertible gene-trap cassette, enabling the establishment of conditional alleles in zebrafish by generating intronic insertions via in vivo homologous reco...

The epicardium promotes neovascularization and cardiomyocyte regeneration by generating vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs) and producing regenerative factors after adult heart infarction. It is therefore a potential cell resource for repair of the injured heart. However, the epicardium also participates in fibrosis and scarring of the injured heart, complicating its use in regenerative medicin...

In order to accurately extract the endocardium and epicardium of the left ventricle from cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images, a method based on developed Otsu and dynamic programming has been proposed. First, regions with high gray value are divided into several left ventricle candidate regions by the developed Otsu algorithm, which based on constraining the search range of the ideal segment...

Methods 60 healthy volunteers, 60 patients with dilative cardiomyopathy, 40 patients with AL amyloidosis and 25 patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy underwent a CMR examination. 4 different techniques for the measurement of LAS were consecutively evaluated. Two of the techniques (LAS-epi/perp and LAS endo/perp) were assessed by measuring the distance between the epicardium or endocardium o...

Introduction Epicardial mapping revealed the existence of abnormal potentials on the right ventricular outflow tract (RVOT) in patients with Brugada syndrome. It is reported that tissues of the RVOT epicardium from open-chest biopsy and autopsy showed the existence of fibrosis and fatty infiltration associated with increased interstitial collagen and decreased connexin 43. Although the abnormal...

INTRODUCTION A mechanism for ST depression arising on the epicardial surface over the border between normal and ischemic tissue is proposed. Depression is caused by current flowing in a transmural loop that begins and ends at the lateral boundary between healthy and ischemic tissue and passes through the transmural boundary between healthy and ischemic tissue. The result is ST depression at the...

Multielectrode catheters provide a percutaneous means of recording activation near the epicardium but only for a relatively small number of sites that are restricted to the major coronary vessels. We have applied a statistical signal processing technique to estimate the value of activation time over the entire epicardium (490 sites) from leadsets consisting of 4 to 40 sites aligned with major b...