Congenital partial absence of the pericardium presenting with a rare concurrent abnormality of vascular ring diagnosed by cardiac magnetic resonance imaging.

Congenital absence of the pericardium is a rare abnormality that can be diagnosed by cardiac imaging procedures. A 49-year-old male needed medical attention due to the appearance of palpitation with a systolic murmur, and a notable aortic arch deviation was seen in the chest X-ray. In the echocardiogram, a poor echo window was detected.

Left ventricular apical hypoplasia: Case report on cardiomyopathy and a history of sudden cardiac death.

Background: Isolated left ventricular apical hypoplasia with several different unrecognized dimensions is a newly discovered congenital anomaly of the heart.

Case Report: In this report, we describe a case of cardiomyopathy of this type occurring in a 13-year-old male with a history of mental retardation and sudden cardiac death (SCD) of second-degree relatives. The patient was referred for an evaluation of cardiac status.

Pseudo-Casimir interactions across nematic films with disordered anchoring axis.

We study the effective pseudo-Casimir interaction forces mediated by a nematic liquid-crystalline film bounded by two planar surfaces, one of which imposes a random (disordered) distribution of the preferred anchoring axis in the so-called easy direction. We consider both the case of a quenched as well as an annealed disorder for the easy direction on the disordered surface and analyze the resultant fluctuation-induced interaction between the surfaces. In the case of quenched disorder, we show that the disorder effects appear additively in the total interaction and are dominant at intermediate inter-surface separations.