"What Did Maxwell's Equations Really Have to Do With Edison's Invention?": Addressing the Complexity of Developing Clinical Interventions for Skeletal Muscle Disease.

To reach the healthcare market and have a medical intervention reimbursed in any format carries high risk and very low success rates. Even when all regulatory hurdles have been surpassed, there is no guarantee that the product will be purchased; a different body makes that decision using criteria typically unknown to early-stage innovators and intervention developers. In the context of skeletal muscle diseases, the field is at a crossroads; accurate diagnoses are difficult to obtain, patient management and monitoring are equally difficult, cures are evasive, and disease progression is not well enough understood in the human to identify clear targets (irrespective of whether the specific muscle disease is rare or frequent because the progression is slow and the tissue large).

Response of methanotrophic communities to afforestation and reforestation in New Zealand.

Methanotrophs use methane (CH(4)) as a carbon source. They are particularly active in temperate forest soils. However, the rate of change of CH(4) oxidation in soil with afforestation or reforestation is poorly understood.

Contact sensing provides a highly accurate means to titrate radiofrequency ablation lesion depth.

Background: Transmural lesions are essential for efficacious ablation. There are, however, no accurate means to estimate lesion depth.

Objective: Explore use of the electrical coupling index (ECI) from the EnSite Contact™ System as a potential variable for lesion depth estimation.

Electroanatomic mapping and radiofrequency ablation of porcine left atria and atrioventricular nodes using magnetic resonance catheter tracking.

Background: The MRI-compatible electrophysiology system previously used for MR-guided left ventricular electroanatomic mapping was enhanced with improved MR tracking, an MR-compatible radiofrequency ablation system and higher-resolution imaging sequences to enable mapping, ablation, and ablation monitoring in smaller cardiac structures. MR-tracked navigation was performed to the left atrium (LA) and atrioventricular (AV) node, followed by LA electroanatomic mapping and radiofrequency ablation of the pulmonary veins (PVs) and AV node.

Methods And Results: One ventricular ablation, 7 PV ablations, 3 LA mappings, and 3 AV node ablations were conducted.

Electroanatomic mapping of the left ventricle in a porcine model of chronic myocardial infarction with magnetic resonance-based catheter tracking.

Background: X-ray fluoroscopy constitutes the fundamental imaging modality for catheter visualization during interventional electrophysiology procedures. The minimal tissue discriminative capability of fluoroscopy is mitigated in part by the use of electroanatomic mapping systems and enhanced by the integration of preacquired 3-dimensional imaging of the heart with computed tomographic or magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. A more ideal paradigm might be to use intraprocedural MR imaging to directly image and guide catheter mapping procedures.