Rationale and design of the ELEANOR trial early aortic valve surgery versus watchful waiting strategy in severe asymptomatic aortic regurgitation, ACRONYM: ELEANOR.

Background: The optimal treatment of patients with severe symptomatic aortic regurgitation (AR) is state-of-the-art surgery. Asymptomatic patients with advanced left ventricular (LV) dilatation and/or impaired ejection fraction should undergo surgical treatment, but there is no guidelines consensus on cut-off values for this recommendation. Multimodality imaging has brought new tools for the accurate selection of asymptomatic patients at risk of early clinical deterioration, however, prospective and randomized data are pending.

Toward a Platform for Structured Data Acquisition in Oncology: A Pilot Study on Prostate Cancer Screening.

Introduction: Physicians spend an ever-rising amount of time to collect relevant information from highly variable medical reports and integrate them into the patient's health condition.

Objectives: We compared synoptic reporting based on data elements to narrative reporting in order to evaluate its capabilities to collect and integrate clinical information.

Methods: We developed a novel system to align medical reporting to data integration requirements and tested it in prostate cancer screening.

Spatial-temporal variability of aerosol sources based on chemical composition and particle number size distributions in an urban settlement influenced by metallurgical industry.

The Moravian-Silesian region of the Czech Republic with its capital city Ostrava is a European air pollution hot spot for airborne particulate matter (PM). Therefore, the spatiotemporal variability assessment of source contributions to aerosol particles is essential for the successful abatement strategies implementation. Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) was applied to highly-time resolved PM chemical composition (1 h resolution) and particle number size distribution (PNSD, 14 nm - 10 μm) data measured at the suburban (Ostrava-Plesná) and urban (Ostrava-Radvanice) residential receptor sites in parallel during an intensive winter campaign.

New comprehensive approach for airborne asbestos characterisation and monitoring.

High concentrations of airborne asbestos in the ambient air are still a serious problem of air quality in numerous localities around the world. Since 2002, elevated concentrations of asbestos minerals of unknown origin have been detected in the ambient air of Pilsen, Czech Republic. To determine the asbestos fibre sources in this urban air, a systematic study was conducted.