Mcleodyoung9777

Background Traditionally endarterectomy has been considered as the gold standard technique for the treatment of common femoral artery (CFA) lesions. The aim of this study is to investigate the procedural safety and mid-term outcomes of minimal invasive Phoenix atherectomy for the treatment of CFA lesions. Patients and methods Phoenix atherectomy was used for treatment of 61 consecutive, moderately to heavily calcified CFA lesions in 56 patients. Ruboxistaurin Lesions were classified based on the CFA occlusive disease classification (Type I, II&III lesions). Primary endpoints were technical, procedural, and clinical success rate. Safety endpoints (vessel perforation, peripheral embolization) and clinically driven target lesion revascularization (TLR) were also assessed. Results Of 61 CFA lesions, 58 (95%) exhibited at least moderate/severe calcification (PACSS3 in 38 (62%) and PACSS4 in 20 (33%) cases). Type III lesions were present in 30 (49%), type I/II lesions in 31 (51%) cases. Technical and procedural success was achieved in 30 (49%) and all 61 (100%) lesions, respectively with low complication rates (0% perforation, 2% embolization). Adjunctive treatment after atherectomy was performed using drug-coated balloon (DCB) in 35 (57%) and bail-out stenting in 6 (10%) cases. Target lesion revascularization (TLR) occurred in 4 (7%) cases during a mean follow-up duration of 11±7months. All patients exhibited clinical improvement at follow-up, showing mean Rutherford category reduction from 3.7±1.1 to 1.5±1.1 (p less then 0.001). Conclusions The Phoenix device can be used for the effective endovascular treatment of CFA lesions, due to its reasonable safety profile and mid-term results.Aim Using baseline data from a clinical trial of domagrozumab in Duchenne muscular dystrophy, we evaluated the correlation between functional measures and quantitative MRI assessments of thigh muscle. Patients & methods Analysis included timed functional tests, knee extension/strength and North Star Ambulatory Assessment. Patients (n = 120) underwent examinations of one thigh, with MRI sequences to enable measurements of muscle volume (MV), MV index, mean T2 relaxation time via T2-mapping and fat fraction. Results MV was moderately correlated with strength assessments. MV index, fat fraction and T2-mapping measures had moderate correlations (r ∼ 0.5) to all functional tests, North Star Ambulatory Assessment and age. Conclusion The moderate correlation between functional tests, age and baseline MRI measures supports MRI as a biomarker in Duchenne muscular dystrophy clinical trials. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02310763; registered 4 November 2014.Aim To investigate the predictive capacity of a systemic immune-inflammation index (SII) in detecting new-onset atrial fibrillation (NOAF) following ST segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). Patients & methods A total of 402 STEMI patients were enrolled in the study. The patients were divided into two groups according to NOAF development. Results A cut-off point of 1,228,000 for SII was identified with 60% sensitivity and 78.1% specificity to predict NOAF following STEMI. According to pairwise analysis of receiver operating characteristic curve analysis, the predictive power of SII in detecting NOAF following STEMI was similar to high-sensitive C-reactive protein, and better than neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio or platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio. Conclusion SII can be used as one of the independent predictors of NOAF following STEMI.

Hypermetabolism in the cerebellum in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) has been consistently observed but often neglected as an artefact produced by the commonly used proportional scaling procedure in the statistical parametric mapping. We hypothesize that the hypermetabolic regions are also important in disease pathology in AD.

Using FDG-PET images from 88 AD subjects and 88 age-sex matched normal controls from the publicly available ADNI database, we developed general linear model based classifier that differentiated AD patients from normal individuals (sensitivity= 87.50%, specificity = 82.95%). We constructed region-region group-wise correlation matrices and evaluated differences in network organisation using graph theory analysis between AD and control subjects.

We confirmed that hypermetabolism in the cerebellum in AD is not an artefact by replicating it using white matter as the reference region. The role of the hypermetabolic cerebellum has been further investigated using graph theory. The differences in betweenness centrality (BC) between AD vs NL network were correlated with region weights of FAC. In particular, the hypermetabolism in cerebellum was accompanied with higher BC. The brain regions with higher BC in AD network showed a progressive increase in FDG uptake over 2 years in prodromal AD patients (n=39).

This study suggests that hypermetabolism in the cerebellum associated with AD may play an important role in forming the AD-related metabolic network.

This study suggests that hypermetabolism in the cerebellum associated with AD may play an important role in forming the AD-related metabolic network.

The selection of an appropriate window size, window function and functional connectivity (FC) metric in the sliding window method, is not straightforward due to the absence of ground truth.

A previously proposed wavelet-based method was accordingly adjusted for estimating time-varying functional connectivity (TVFC) and was applied on a large high-quality, low-motion dataset of 400 resting-state fMRI data. Specifically, the wavelet coherence magnitude and relative phase were averaged across wavelet (frequency) scales to yield TVFC and synchronization patterns. To assess whether the observed fluctuations in TVFC were statistically significant (dynamic FC [dFC]; the distinction between TVFC and dFC is intentional), surrogate data were generated using the multivariate Phase (MVPR) and multivariate Auto-regressive Randomization (MVAR) methods to define the null hypothesis of dFC absence.

By averaging across all frequencies, core regions of the Default Mode Network (DMN; medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices, inferior parietal lobes, hippocampal formation) were found to exhibit dFC (test-retest reproducibility of 90%) and were also synchronized in activity (-15°≤phase≤15°).