Safety and feasibility of returning patients early to their originating centers after transfer for primary percutaneous coronary intervention.

Introduction And Objectives: At present, little information is available on returning patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) to their originating centers after transfer for primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI). The objective of this study was to evaluate the safety and feasibility of the early return of these patients to their originating centers.

Methods: The cohort study involved 200 consecutive STEMI patients (age 62+/-13 years, 83% male) who were returned to their originating centers after PPCI.

Persistence of instanton connections in chemical reactions with time-dependent rates.

The evolution of a system of chemical reactions can be studied, in the eikonal approximation, by means of a Hamiltonian dynamical system. The fixed points of this dynamical system represent the different states in which the chemical system can be found, and the connections among them represent instantons or optimal paths linking these states. We study the relation between the phase portrait of the Hamiltonian system representing a set of chemical reactions with constant rates and the corresponding system when these rates vary in time.

Feasibility of pulsed-Doppler tissue imaging of the interventricular septum during exercise echocardiography.

Background: A limitation of exercise echocardiography (EE) is its semiquantitative approach in analyzing wall-motion abnormalities. However, pulsed-Doppler tissue imaging is capable of a systolic and diastolic regional quantitative assessment.

Methods: To investigate the feasibility of performing pulsed-Doppler tissue imaging sampling of the basal left ventricular (LV) septum during EE, we studied 105 consecutive patients (71 men, 34 women, aged 61 +/- 11 years).