Height and sex is strongly associated with radial augmentation index in Korean patients with never-treated hypertension.

Objectives: Central hemodynamics may better represent the load imposed on the coronary and cerebral arteries and thereby bear a stronger relationship to cardiovascular outcomes.

Methods: Patients who had confirmed hypertension as assessed by daytime 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (≥135/85 mmHg) were enrolled. Central blood pressure and radial augmentation index (AIx) corrected for a heart rate of 75 bpm (radial AIx 75) were measured for all patients.

Pulmonary artery angiosarcoma confused with acute pulmonary thromboembolism: focusing on clinical and echocardiographic features in the differentiation of two categories.

Although pulmonary artery angiosarcoma is rare, it can be misdiagnosed as pulmonary embolism because of its similar clinical and diagnostic features. The diagnosis is often delayed and the misdiagnosis brings unnecessary treatment. Because we made a wrong diagnosis of pulmonary artery angiosarcoma as an acute pulmonary embolism, we did thrombolytic therapy which could be dangerous to the patient.

Intracardiac echocardiography to guide biopsy for two cases of intracardiac masses.

Pathologic diagnosis of a cardiac mass is vital in determining the proper treatment modality. Open heart surgery or transesophageal echocardiography guided biopsy can be feasible methods to confirm the pathology. However, the former is highly invasive and both methods require general anesthesia.

A comparison of different techniques of two-dimensional speckle-tracking strain measurements of right ventricular systolic function in patients with acute pulmonary embolism.

Background: Speckle-tracking echocardiography has been applied to measure right ventricular (RV) systolic function in various diseases. However, variations in strain measurement by different vendors have limited the application of these techniques for assessment of RV function. We sought to compare two methods for the assessment of RV systolic function in patients with acute pulmonary embolism (PE).