Archives of Cardiovascular Imaging

Letter

21/11/2023

Mehrnoush Toufan, Seyed Sajjad Mahmoudi

Research Article

29/11/2023

Assessment of Left Atrial Function After Percutaneous Coronary Intervention: A Doppler-Based Strain and Strain Rate Study

Fariba Bayat, Mehdi Nazmdeh, Morteza Safi, Amirsaeed Karimi, Latif Gachkar

Case Report

28/11/2023

Hypertrophic Obstructive Cardiomyopathy and Takotsubo Syndrome: Could They Coexist?

Pilar Egea-Serrano, Ivan Keituqwa, AnaI Pelaez, Juan R Gimeno

Case Report

29/9/2023

New-Onset Liver Failure: Pitfalls of an Unusual Diagnosis

Francisco Jose Romeo, Ezequiel Guzzetti, Anibal Arias, Cesar Belziti, Ricardo Marenchino

Case Presentation: We present a case-series where 3 patients were referred to our hospital for further hepatology assessment due to severe abdominal ascites and liver failure. Constrictive pericarditis was diagnosed in all of them. Nowadays, constrictive pericarditis is a well-known disease, but sometimes its clinical presentation may delay the treatment and worsen the prognosis. Our 3 cases had similar clinical scenarios and hemodynamic patterns when undergoing right-heart catheterization, but they had different anatomical pericardium-compromise, requiring different surgical strategies.

Conclusions: Nowadays, multimodality imaging, especially cardiac magnetic resonance imaging and cardiac computed tomography, allows us to study a wide spectrum of the same disease in terms of anatomical compromise and cardiac physiology in order to stratify different prognosis and treatment options. We describe 3 unusual clinical cases where the initial differential diagnosis denoted noncardiac etiologies. The level of serum NT-proBNP proved pivotal to the redefinition of the clinical scenario and differentiation between the cardiac and noncardiac etiologies of new-onset ascites. A multidisciplinary approach in this setting between internists, hepatologists, and cardiologists was helpful to establish the final diagnosis in all the patients.

Brief Report

28/11/2023

Exercise Stress Echocardiography and Tissue Synchronization Imaging of Myocardial Dyssynchrony

Veronica Bordonaro, Sergio Buccheri, Corrado Tamburino, Ines Paola Monte

Background: Stress echocardiography represents one of the best possible imaging choice for the diagnosis and stratification of patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). However, this imaging technique presents some limitations such as the quality of the image, high inter-observer variability, and the operator-dependent expertise. New technologies have been recently developed to provide an objective, operator-independent, and quantitative analysis of regional myocardial function.

Patients and Methods: The ESE and TSI analysis of left ventricular (LV) segments was performed for 30 patients with CAD previously treated with revascularization therapy (CADr group) and the results were compared to those in 30 healthy subjects (norm group). The echo protocol comprised echocardiographic examinations at baseline, at the peak of exercise, and at 5 minutes after recovery as well as biplane and triplane acquisitions, pulsed wave of mitral flow, continuous wave of tricuspid regurgitation, tissue Doppler at the mitral annulus, TSI with an automatically detected positive time-to-peak velocity (Tp), and the measurement of the maximum activation time delay between myocardial segments and its standard deviation at baseline and peak stress for each patient.

Results: The CADr group showed a lower increase in E (P = 0.005), A (P = 0.006), S’ (P < 0.001), and E’ (P = 0.006) velocities at both baseline and peak stress and a significantly increased ventricular dyssynchrony at baseline and at peak stress (P < 0.01) compared to the norm group. The baseline-peak variations in the CADr group did not show significant differences. The relationships between the maximum activation delay and the other echocardiographic parameters showed a significant negative correlation with LV ejection fraction (r = 0.217; P = 0.031) and S’ velocity (r = -0.393; P < 0.001) and a positive correlation with the E/E’ ratio (r = 0.376; P < 0.001). The comparison between the different ischemic territories revascularized in terms of the delay in ventricular activation showed the greatest delay in the revascularized territory in 63% of the patients with ischemia.

Review Article

1/11/2023

The Right Ventricle: A Comprehensive Review From Anatomy, Physiology, and Mechanics to Hemodynamic, Functional, and Imaging Evaluation

Anita Sadeghpour, Azin Alizadehasl

The right ventricle (RV) is a complex structure with abstruse function that reveals important differences when compared to the left ventricle (LV), so it cannot be described as a simple geometric form and achromatic physiology. As an inference from this fact, in the present review, we aim to describe RV structure including the embryology, anatomy, and physiology and present a functional, hemodynamic, and imaging assessment of the normal and failing RV. So that, we conducted a thorough review based on the database sources such as MEDLINE, PubMed, Cochrane and Google scholar. No restrictions were placed on study date, study design, or language of publication. We searched all valuable and relevant information considering the anatomy, physiology, mechanics, hemodynamic and imaging evaluation of RV.

Archives of Cardiovascular Imaging: Nov 2015, 3 (4), 6 articles.