: In adults, epicardial adipose tissue (EAT) is associated with metabolic syndrome (MS) and coronary artery disease. EAT thickness is increased in obese youth, but total EAT volume and its correlation with cardiovascular risk factors have not been studied. : To determine EAT volume in adolescents and its association with obesity and cardiovascular risk factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThanks to recent developments in Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR), cardiac diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance is fast emerging in a range of clinical applications. Cardiac diffusion-weighted imaging (cDWI) and diffusion tensor imaging (cDTI) now enable investigators and clinicians to assess and quantify the 3D microstructure of the heart. Free-contrast DWI is uniquely sensitized to the presence and displacement of water molecules within the myocardial tissue, including the intra-cellular, extra-cellular and intra-vascular spaces.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Instantaneous Signal Loss Simulation (InSiL) model is a promising alternative to the classical mono-exponential fitting of the Modified Look-Locker Inversion-recovery (MOLLI) sequence in cardiac T mapping applications, which achieves better accuracy and is less sensitive to heart rate (HR) variations. Classical non-linear least squares (NLLS) estimation methods require some parameters of the model to be fixed a priori in order to give reliable T estimations and avoid outliers. This introduces further bias in the estimation, reducing the advantages provided by the InSiL model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImplementing a standardized phosphorus-31 magnetic resonance spectroscopy ( P-MRS) dynamic acquisition protocol to evaluate skeletal muscle energy metabolism and monitor muscle fatigability, while being compatible with various longitudinal clinical studies on diversified patient cohorts, requires a high level of technicality and expertise. Furthermore, processing data to obtain reliable results also demands a great degree of expertise from the operator. In this two-part article, we present an advanced quality control approach for data acquired using a dynamic P-MRS protocol.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this second part of a two-part paper, we intend to demonstrate the impact of the previously proposed advanced quality control pipeline. To understand its benefit and challenge the proposed methodology in a real scenario, we chose to compare the outcome when applying it to the analysis of two patient populations with significant but highly different types of fatigue: COVID-19 and multiple sclerosis (MS). P-MRS was performed on a 3 T clinical MRI, in 19 COVID-19 patients, 38 MS patients, and 40 matched healthy controls.
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