Noninvasive Advanced Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance-Derived Fontan Hemodynamics Are Associated With Reduced Kidney Function But Not Albuminuria

BACKGROUND: Kidney disease is the most important predictor of death in patients with a Fontan circulation, yet its clinical and hemodynamic correlates have not been well established. METHODS AND RESULTS: A total of 53 ambulatory patients with a Fontan circulation (median age, 16.2 years, 52.8% male patients) underwent advanced cardiovascular...

Serial RV wall stress measurements: association with right ventricular function in repaired Tetralogy of Fallot patients

Background: Optimal timing of pulmonary valve replacement (PVR) in Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) patients remains challenging. Ventricular wall stress is considered to be an early marker of right ventricular (RV) dysfunction.<br/><br/>Objectives: To investigate the association of RV wall stresses and their change over time with functional parameters...

Mechanical wall stress and wall shear stress are associated with atherosclerosis development in non-calcified coronary segments

Background and aims: Atherosclerotic plaque onset and progression are known to be affected by local biomechanical factors. While the role of wall shear stress (WSS) has been studied, the impact of another biomechanical factor, namely mechanical wall stress (MWS), remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the association of MWS...

The Correlation Between Wall Shear Stress and Plaque Composition in Advanced Human Carotid Atherosclerosis

The role of wall shear stress (WSS) in atherosclerotic plaque development is evident, but the relation between WSS and plaque composition in advanced atherosclerosis, potentially resulting in plaque destabilization, is a topic of discussion. Using our previously developed image registration pipeline, we investigated the relation between two...

Spectroscopic thermo-elastic optical coherence tomography for tissue characterization

Optical imaging techniques that provide free space, label free imaging are powerful tools in obtaining structural and biochemical information in biological samples. To date, most of the optical imaging technologies create images with a specific contrast and require multimodality integration to add additional contrast. In this study, we...

Financial Incentives for Healthy Living for Patients with Cardiac Disease from the Perspective of Health Care Professionals: Interview Study

Background: A promising new approach to support lifestyle changes in patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the use of financial incentives. Although financial incentives have proven to be effective, their implementation remains controversial, and ethical objections have been raised. It is unknown whether health care professionals ...

Automated Quantitative Assessment of Coronary Calcification Using Intravascular Ultrasound

Coronary calcification represents a challenge in the treatment of coronary artery disease by stent placement. It negatively affects stent expansion and has been related to future adverse cardiac events. Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is known for its high sensitivity in detecting coronary calcification. At present, automated quantification...

Determinants of carotid atherosclerotic plaque burden in a stroke-free population

Background and aims In a large stroke-free population, we sought to identify cardiovascular risk factors and carotid plaque components associated with carotid plaque burden, lumen volume and stenosis. Methods The carotid arteries of 1562 stroke-free participants from The Rotterdam Study were imaged on a 1.5-Tesla MRI scanner. Inner and outer...

Peak cap stress calculations in coronary atherosclerotic plaques with an incomplete necrotic core geometry

Background: Stress calculations in atherosclerotic coronary vulnerable plaques can aid in predicting coronary cap rupture. In vivo plaque geometry and composition of coronary arteries can merely be obtained via intravascular imaging. Only optical driven imaging techniques have sufficient resolution to visualize the fibrous cap, but due to...

Closing the innovation cycle in lightweighting compressor pistons technology

What started out as an exercise in exploring the weight reduction potential of those allegedly “heavy recip crossheads”, turned out to be a fast leap towards implementation of a new hybrid material concept for very lightweight pistons. This was enabled by a next phase in the EFRC R&amp;D group research project which has been subject of this...

Influence of the accuracy of angiography-based reconstructions on velocity and wall shear stress computations in coronary bifurcations: A phantom study

Wall shear stress (WSS) plays a key role in the onset and progression of atherosclerosis in human coronary arteries. Especially sites with low and oscillating WSS near bifurcations have a higher propensity to develop atherosclerosis. WSS computations in coronary bifurcations can be performed in angiography-based 3D reconstructions. It is...

A computer-simulation study on the effects of MRI voxel dimensions on carotid plaque lipid-core and fibrous cap segmentation and stress modeling

Background The benefits of a decreased slice thickness and/or in-plane voxel size in carotid MRI for atherosclerotic plaque component quantification accuracy and biomechanical peak cap stress analysis have not yet been investigated in detail because of practical limitations. Methods In order to provide a methodology that allows such an...

Atherosclerotic Plaque Component Segmentation in Combined Carotid MRI and CTA Data Incorporating Class Label Uncertainty

Atherosclerotic plaque composition can indicate plaque vulnerability. We segment atherosclerotic plaque components from the carotid artery on a combination of in vivo MRI and CT-angiography (CTA) data using supervised voxelwise classification. In contrast to previous studies the ground truth for training is directly obtained from 3D registration...

Effects of intima stiffness and plaque morphology on peak cap stress

Background: Rupture of the cap of a vulnerable plaque present in a coronary vessel may cause myocardial infarction and death. Cap rupture occurs when the peak cap stress exceeds the cap strength. The mechanical stress within a cap depends on the plaque morphology and the material characteristics of the plaque components. A parametric study was...

Plaque characterization in ex vivo MRI evaluated by dense 3D correspondence with histology

Automatic quantification of carotid artery plaque composition is important in the development of methods that distinguish vulnerable from stable plaques. MRI has shown to be capable of imaging different components noninvasively. We present a new plaque classification method which uses 3D registration of histology data with ex vivo MRI data,...

Effects of intima stiffness and plaque morphology

Besturing bouwkundige kwaliteit bij het beheer van schoolgebouwen: Evaluatie van het Londo-vergoedingsstelsel in de periode 1985-1991 in relatie tot het bouwkundig onderhoud

The application of the finite element method to an aerodynamic problem specific to propeller design