Delayed-enhancement cardiac magnetic resonance imaging detects disease progression in patients with mitral valve disease and atrial fibrillation.

Objectives: The mechanism by which mitral valve (MV) disease leads to atrial fibrillation (AF) remains poorly understood. Delayed-enhancement cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (DE-MRI) has been used to assess left atrial (LA) fibrosis in patients with lone AF before catheter ablation; however, few studies have used DE-MRI to assess MV-induced LA fibrosis in patients with or without AF undergoing MV surgery.

Methods: Between March 2018 and September 2022, 38 subjects were enrolled; 15 age-matched controls, 14 patients with lone mitral regurgitation (MR), and 9 patients with MR and AF (MR + AF).

Minimally Invasive Mitral Valve Surgery With Concomitant Cox Maze Procedure Is as Effective as a Median Sternotomy With Decreased Morbidity.

Objective: A right minithoracotomy (RMT) is a minimally invasive surgical approach that has been increasingly performed for the concomitant Cox maze IV procedure (CMP) and mitral valve surgery (MVS). Little is known regarding whether long-term rhythm and survival outcomes are affected by the RMT as compared with the traditional median sternotomy (MS) approach.

Methods: Between April 2004 and April 2021, 377 patients underwent the concomitant CMP and MVS, of whom 38% had RMT.

Oxonium ion scanning mass spectrometry for large-scale plasma glycoproteomics.

Protein glycosylation, a complex and heterogeneous post-translational modification that is frequently dysregulated in disease, has been difficult to analyse at scale. Here we report a data-independent acquisition technique for the large-scale mass-spectrometric quantification of glycopeptides in plasma samples. The technique, which we named 'OxoScan-MS', identifies oxonium ions as glycopeptide fragments and exploits a sliding-quadrupole dimension to generate comprehensive and untargeted oxonium ion maps of precursor masses assigned to fragment ions from non-enriched plasma samples.

Surgical ablation for atrial fibrillation is efficacious in patients with giant left atria.

Objective: The Cox-Maze IV procedure (CMP-IV) is the most effective treatment for atrial fibrillation. Increased left atrial (LA) size has been identified as a risk factor for failure to restore sinus rhythm. This has biased many surgeons against ablation in patients with giant left atrium (GLA), defined as LA diameter >6.