Outcomes in patients with aortic stenosis and severely reduced ejection fraction following surgical aortic valve replacement and transcatheter aortic valve replacement.

Background: Patients with severe aortic stenosis (AS) and left ventricular (LV) dysfunction demonstrate improvement in left ventricular injection fraction (LVEF) after aortic valve replacement (AVR). The timing and magnitude of recovery in patients with very low LVEF (≤ 25%) in surgical or transcatheter AVR is not well studied.

Objective: Determine clinical outcomes following transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) and surgical aortic valve repair (SAVR) in the subset of patients with severely reduced EF ≤ 25%.

Heparin Dosing During Percutaneous Coronary Intervention and Obesity.

Unfractionated heparin is the most common anticoagulant used during percutaneous coronary intervention. Practice guidelines recommend an initial weight-based heparin bolus dose between 70 and 100 U/kg to achieve target activated clotting time (ACT) of 250-300 seconds. The impact of severe obesity on weight-based heparin dosing is not well studied.

A case report of constrictive pericarditis following COVID-19 vaccination.

Background: COVID-19 infection and the COVID-19 vaccines have been associated with rare cases of pericarditis. We present a case of constrictive pericarditis (CP) following the vaccine.

Case Summary: A 19-year-old healthy male started having progressive abdominal pain, emesis, dyspnoea, and pleuritic chest pain 2 weeks after the second dose of Pfizer vaccine.

Risk Factors for Reoperation After Arterial Switch Operation.

Objective: The timing and nature of and risk factors for reoperation after the arterial switch operation in the setting of d-transposition of the great arteries requires further elucidation.

Methods: A total of 403 patients who underwent arterial switch operation from 1986 to 2017 were reviewed. Institutional preference was for pulmonary artery reconstruction using a pantaloon patch of fresh autologous pericardium.

Automated generation of curved planar reformations from volume data: method and evaluation.

The authors developed and evaluated a method to automatically create interactive vascular curved planar reformations with computed tomographic (CT) angiographic data. The method decreased user interaction time by 86%, from 15 to 2 minutes. Expert reviewers were asked to indicate their confidence in differentiating automatically created images from clinical-quality manually produced images.