BACKGROUND Despite complete interruption of antegrade coronary artery flow in the setting of a chronic total occlusion (CTO), clinical recognition of myocardial infarction is often challenging. Using cardiac MRI, we investigated the frequency and extent of myocardial infarction in patients with CTO, and assessed their relationship with regional systolic function and the extent of angiographic c...

PURPOSE To compare the relative value of clinical variables with dobutamine-atropine stress echocardiography to predict cardiac events during long-term follow-up. Dobutamine stress echocardiography is increasingly used for the detection of coronary artery disease, but little is known of its prognostic value. PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 430 patients (310 men; mean age 61 years, range 22 to...

Background/Aim. Ischemic heart disease is the major cause of morbidity and mortality in the world as well as in our country. Ischemic heart disease has the multifactorial origin and the presence of several risk factors increases the risk of myocardial ischemia. The aim of the study was to evaluate the frequency and characteristics of myocardial ischemia in asymptomatic subjects with two or more...

Electrocardiograph-gated blood pool scans (anteroposterior and left anterior oblique projections) were recorded in 30 patients seven to 10 days after myocardial infarction. Left ventricular ejection fractions (mean 0.26 +/- 0.10) were lower on average than values previously obtained in 11 normal subjects (mean 0.52 +/- 0.06) and correlated broadly with the clinical assessment of left ventricula...

Murine models of cardiac disease are becoming an important tool for studying pathophysiological processes. Development of methods to accurately assess ventricular function are therefore important. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of echocardiographic assessment of segmental wall motion abnormalities in a murine model of myocardial infarction. Two-dimensional contrast (C...

BACKGROUND The aim of the present study was to characterize temporal changes in cyclic variation of ultrasonic integrated backscatter (IBS), which reflects intrinsic contractile performance, in patients with reperfused acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and to elucidate the clinical value of tissue characterization in predicting myocardial viability. METHODS AND RESULTS We recorded short-axis ...

OBJECTIVES The goal of this study was to determine, in patients with a recent myocardial infarction (MI) and residual wall motion abnormalities within the distribution of the infarct-related artery, whether normal perfusion by myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE) would accurately predict recovery of segmental left ventricular (LV) function. BACKGROUND Left ventricular dysfunction after ...

BACKGROUND T2w-CMR is used widely to assess myocardial edema. Quantitative T1-mapping is also sensitive to changes in free water content. We hypothesized that T1-mapping would have a higher diagnostic performance in detecting acute edema than dark-blood and bright-blood T2w-CMR. METHODS We investigated 21 controls (55 ± 13 years) and 21 patients (61 ± 10 years) with Takotsubo cardiomyopathy o...

BACKGROUND Automated function imaging (AFI) is a recently developed method of calculating the longitudinal peak systolic strains (LS) of the regional left ventricular (LV) wall using speckle tracking echocardiography and displaying them on a single bull's-eye map. The feasibility of AFI in patients with regional LV wall motion abnormalities caused by myocardial infarction (MI) was evaluated by ...