Sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibition does not improve the acute pressure natriuresis response in rats with type 1 diabetes.

New Findings: What is the central question of this study? Sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors reduce cardiovascular risk in patients with both diabetic and non-diabetic kidney disease: can SGLT2 inhibition improve renal pressure natriuresis (PN), an important mechanism for long-term blood pressure control, which is impaired in type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM)? What is the main finding and its importance? The SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin did not enhance the acute in vivo PN response in either healthy or T1DM Sprague-Dawley rats. The data suggest that the mechanism underpinning the clinical benefits of SGLT2 inhibitors on health is unlikely to be due to an enhanced natriuretic response to increased blood pressure.

Abstract: Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) leads to serious complications including premature cardiovascular and kidney disease.

The acute pressure natriuresis response is suppressed by selective ETA receptor blockade.

Hypertension is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease.  In a significant minority of people, it develops when salt intake is increased (salt-sensitivity).  It is not clear whether this represents impaired vascular function or disruption to the relationship between blood pressure (BP) and renal salt-handling (pressure natriuresis, PN).

Impaired pressure natriuresis and non-dipping blood pressure in rats with early type 1 diabetes mellitus.

Key Points: Type 1 diabetes mellitus increases cardiovascular risk; hypertension amplifies this risk, while pressure natriuresis regulates long-term blood pressure. We induced type 1 diabetes in rats by streptozotocin injection and demonstrated a substantial impairment of pressure natriuresis: acute increases in blood pressure did not increase renal medullary blood flow, tubular sodium reabsorption was not downregulated, and proximal tubule sodium reabsorption, measured by lithium clearance, was unaffected. Insulin reduced blood glucose in diabetic rats, and rescued the pressure natriuresis response without influencing lithium clearance, but did not restore medullary blood flow.

Image intensity normalisation by maximising the Siddon line integral in the joint intensity distribution space.

This paper presents a novel data-driven method for image intensity normalisation, which is a prerequisite step for any kind of image comparison. The method involves a novel application of the Siddon algorithm that was developed initially for fast reconstruction of tomographic images and is based on a linear normalisation model with either one or two parameters. The latter are estimated by maximising the line integral, computed using the Siddon algorithm, in the 2D joint intensity distribution space of image pairs.

Tracking 'differential organ motion' with a 'breathing' multileaf collimator: magnitude of problem assessed using 4D CT data and a motion-compensation strategy.

Intrafraction tumour (e.g. lung) motion due to breathing can, in principle, be compensated for by applying identical breathing motions to the leaves of a multileaf collimator (MLC) as intensity-modulated radiation therapy is delivered by the dynamic MLC (DMLC) technique.

A strategy to minimize errors from differential intrafraction organ motion using a single configuration for a 'breathing' multileaf collimator.

Intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) can be delivered by the 'sliding-leaves' dynamic multileaf collimator (DMLC) technique. Intrafraction organ motion can be accommodated by arranging an identical tracking motion for 'breathing leaves'. However, this is only possible for very specific circumstances such as regular, mathematically parameterizable, rigid-body, density-conserving, one-dimensional translations.

The potential use of 99mTc-MDP bone scans to plan high-activity 186Re-HEDP targeted therapy of bony metastases from prostate cancer.

Patients with skeletal metastases from hormone-refractory prostate cancer have shown variable responses to high-activity therapy with (186)Re-HEDP and peripheral stem cell support. In this paper, we report on the use of a novel technique to compare sequential planar images acquired post-(186)Re-HEDP therapy administration with pretherapy diagnostic (99m)Tc-MDP scans, to evaluate the turnover of the radiopharmaceutical in normal and abnormal bone. It was found that the activity in normal (i.

Scaling images using their background ratio. An application in statistical comparisons of images.

Comparison of two medical images often requires image scaling as a pre-processing step. This is usually done with the scaling-to-the-mean or scaling-to-the-maximum techniques which, under certain circumstances, in quantitative applications may contribute a significant amount of bias. In this paper, we present a simple scaling method which assumes only that the most predominant values in the corresponding images belong to their background structure.

Ring filter to locate external boundaries in SPECT using scattered radiation.

A novel form of filter for SPECT is described, in which, after back projection and summation, the reconstructed signal is a measure of the total activity within a ring of specified radius, centre and width. The filter is applied to the problem of using Compton scattered radiation to locate external boundaries. In the simple case of the determination of the radius of a circular scattering body of known centre, the filter output would identify a transition region and define an appropriate threshold as the boundary was crossed.

A prototype rotating slat collimator for single photon emission computed tomography.

A collimator consisting of a series of highly attenuating parallel slats has been constructed and used in conjunction with a gamma-camera to approximately measure planar projections of a given radionuclide distribution. The enlarged solid angle of acceptance afforded by the slat collimator gave rise to an increased geometric efficiency of between 12 and 28 times that observed with a low-energy high-resolution (LEHR) parallel-hole collimator. When the slats rotated over the face of the detector and the camera gantry turned about the object, sufficient projections were acquired to reconstruct a three-dimensional (3-D) image using the inversion of the 3-D radon transform.

The experimental evaluation of a prototype rotating slat collimator for planar gamma camera imaging.

A collimator consisting of a series of parallel slats has been constructed and used in conjunction with a conventional gamma camera to collect one-dimensional projections of the radioisotope distribution being imaged. With the camera remaining stationary, the collimator was made to rotate continuously over the face of the detector and the projections acquired were used to reconstruct a planar image by the theory of computed tomography. The propagation of noise on image reconstruction was largely offset by the increased geometric efficiency that resulted from the enlarged solid angle of acceptance afforded by the slat collimator.

Monte Carlo modelling of the performance of a rotating slit-collimator for improved planar gamma-camera imaging.

Planar imaging with a gamma camera is currently limited by the performance of the collimator. Spatial resolution and sensitivity trade off against each other; it is not possible with conventional parallel-hole collimation to have high geometric sensitivity and at the same time excellent spatial resolution unless field-of-view is sacrificed by using fan- or cone-beam collimators. We propose a rotating slit-collimator which collects one-dimensional projections from which the planar image may be reconstructed by the theory of computed tomography.