Cardiac and pulmonary sarcoidosis presenting as syncopal episode: Report of two cases.

Sarcoidosis is a systemic disorder of unknown etiology with a wide variety of clinical and radiologic manifestations, most commonly pulmonary. We describe two patients with biopsy-proven sarcoidosis and an initial presentation of syncope. We present the results of multimodality imaging evaluation of these patients, with an emphasis on the spectrum of findings provided by cardiovascular magnetic resonance.

Arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia: initial presentation in a middle-aged woman.

Arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia is a rare disorder that is familial in 30% to 50% of cases. It is characterized by structural and functional abnormalities of the right ventricle and a propensity for ventricular arrhythmias and sudden death. We report the case of a 59-year-old woman who had idiopathic, severe, right-sided heart failure and nonsustained ventricular tachycardia.

Automatic identification of the left ventricle in cardiac cine-MR images: dual-contrast cluster analysis and scout-geometry approaches.

Purpose: To evaluate the technical feasibility of two approaches--dual-contrast (DC) cluster analysis, and scout geometry (SG)--for automatic identification of the left ventricular (LV) cavity in short-axis (SA) cine-MR images.

Materials And Methods: The DC algorithm uses Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) cluster analysis of SA images from a black-blood double-inversion recovery turbo spin-echo (dual IR TSE) sequence, and bright-blood images from a steady-state free precession (SSFP) sequence. The SG algorithm employs geometric information from scout views (i.