A novel approach to monitoring pulmonary congestion in heart failure: initial animal and clinical experiences using remote dielectric sensing technology.

Despite current therapies and disease management approaches, rates of heart failure (HF) rehospitalization remain high. New tools are needed to assess preclinical (asymptomatic) pulmonary congestion to enable outpatient management. Hence, a novel monitoring system based on noninvasive remote dielectric sensing (ReDS) technology was developed.

Digital image enhancement improves diagnosis of nondisplaced proximal femur fractures.

Unlabelled: Today most emergency room radiographs are computerized, making digital image enhancement a natural advancement to improve fracture diagnosis. We compared the diagnosis of nondisplaced proximal femur fractures using four different image enhancement methods using standard DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) after window-leveling optimization. Twenty-nine orthopaedic residents and specialists reviewed 28 pelvic images consisting of 25 occult proximal femur fractures and three images with no fracture, using four different image filters and the original DICOM image.

In vivo validation of a novel method for regional myocardial wall motion analysis based on echocardiographic tissue tracking.

The objective of this study was to validate a recently developed tissue tracking (TT) method for cardiac motion, by comparing it with precise invasive measurements of motion and to prove its capability to reflect moderate hemodynamic changes induced by asynchronous activation. In four open-chest sheep, sono-crystals measured the left ventricle(LV) equator's diameters simultaneously with 2D ultrasound acquisition. The LV was paced either from the posterior or from the lateral wall, just prior to the normal LV activation.

Detection of the cardiac activation sequence by novel echocardiographic tissue tracking method.

Asynchronous cardiac activation leads to decreased pumping efficiency. Quantifying the activation sequence may optimize both the selection of patients for cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) and its efficacy. The feasibility of assessing the directivity and the degree of synchronous activation with ultrasound was examined.

Assessment of myocardial regional strain and strain rate by tissue tracking in B-mode echocardiograms.

To date, established ultrasonic methods for myocardial regional deformation recovery are based on the Doppler effect, which has inherent limitations restricting its accuracy and use. The reported time domain methods show in vivo insufficient accuracy. A novel approach is elaborated mimicking the human observer who reaches robust diagnosis upon the B-mode data.