REduction of THRomboembolic EVents during Ablation using the laserballoon: The RETHREVA registry.

Introduction: Cerebral events (CEs), including silent (SCEs), are a known complication of left atrial catheter ablation (LACA) in patients with atrial fibrillation. The aim of this prospective registry was to gain more information about CEs during laserballoon LACA and to reduce the risk of their occurrence.

Methods And Results: We enrolled 74 patients (age 61 ± 11 years; 74% male; CHA DS -VASc 1.

MRI lesions after invasive therapy of carotid artery stenosis: a risk-modeling analysis.

Background: Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) abnormalities can frequently be detected after carotid endarterectomy (CEA) and carotid angioplasty with stent placement (CAS) of the carotid arteries. We looked for possible predictors for the development of DWI lesions during the intervention.

Methods: We investigated 41 patients who underwent CAS without protection devices and 93 patients who underwent CEA.

"Silent event-related" fMRI reveals reduced sensorimotor activation in laryngeal dystonia.

Objective: To study with fMRI the pattern of sensorimotor activation in patients with spasmodic dysphonia (laryngeal dystonia) compared to healthy controls.

Methods: The authors performed fMRI measurements during vocal motor tasks in 12 patients with laryngeal dystonia and compared them with those of 12 healthy volunteers. Patients were scanned before (pre) and after (post) treatment with local injections of botulinum toxin (BTX).

Vowel sound extraction in anterior superior temporal cortex.

We investigated the functional neuroanatomy of vowel processing. We compared attentive auditory perception of natural German vowels to perception of nonspeech band-passed noise stimuli using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). More specifically, the mapping in auditory cortex of first and second formants was considered, which spectrally characterize vowels and are linked closely to phonological features.