1,721,147 research outputs found
Multimodality imaging in cardiac amyloidosis: a primer for cardiologists
Amyloidosis is a systemic infiltrative disease, in which unstable proteins misfold, form aggregates and amyloid fibrils which can deposit in various organs: heart, kidneys, liver, gastrointestinal tract, nervous system structures, lungs, or soft tissue. Cardiac amyloidosis (CA) diagnosis requires awareness, high level of clinical suspicion and expertise in integrating clinical, electrocardiographic, and multimodality imaging data. The overall scenario is complex and no single test emerges over the others, but different techniques are useful at various stages of the diagnostic workup. After a clinical suspicion of CA is raised by various non-imaging red-flags, eligible patients should undergo complete echocardiography and multiparametric cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging. Even though the clinical suspicion of CA is confirmed by cardiac imaging, the accurate differentiation between the two most frequent and treatable amyloid types, i.e. light chain (AL) and transthyretin (ATTR) requires further work-up including phosphate scintigraphy. This article reviews the latest and essential data on multimodality imaging of patients with suspected or confirmed CA in a useful and practical manner for the general and imaging cardiologists
HIT communication paper:Strategies and tips to increase your chances of winning an EACVI grant
The European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI), a branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), is dedicated to promoting excellence in clinical diagnosis, research, technical development, and education in cardiovascular imaging (CVI). One of the ways EACVI achieves its goals are through the grants it provides to fund the professional development of young cardiologists in the field of non-invasive CVI. In the past 12 years, EACVI awarded a total of 41 grants, 29 for research and 12 for training. The success of the EACVI grant programme and the positive impact on young professionals’ careers were published in 2009 and 2015
European multicentre validation study of the accuracy of E/e' ratio in estimating invasive left ventricular filling pressure: EURO-FILLING study.
peer reviewedAIMS: The non-invasive estimation of left ventricular filling pressures (LVFPs) represents a main goal in the clinical setting. Current recommendations encourage the use of pulsed-wave Tissue Doppler for calculating the ratio between the preload-dependent transmitral E velocity and the average of septal and lateral early diastolic velocities (e') of the mitral annulus. Despite its wide use, real utility of the E/e' ratio has been recently challenged in patients with either very advanced heart failure or preserved left ventricular (LV) ejection fraction. However, only few studies performed the invasive and non-invasive estimation of LVFP simultaneously. The EURO-FILLING Study will validate the E/e' ratio (and additional non-invasive estimates) against simultaneously measured LVFP obtained by left heart catheterization in a multicentre study involving reference European echo laboratories collecting a wide population sample size of cardiac patients with and without heart failure. METHODS AND RESULTS: The EURO-FILLING study is a large, prospective observational study in which simultaneous assessment of invasive and non-invasive measurements of LVFP will be acquired in eight reference European centres. Centralized reading of the collected parameters will be performed in a core laboratory. Not only standardized echo Doppler measurements but also novel echo parameters such as LV global longitudinal strain and global atrial strain (obtainable by two-dimensional speckle tracking echocardiography) will be tested for predicting invasive measurements of LVFP. CONCLUSIONS: The EURO-FILLING study is expected to provide important information on non-invasive assessment of LVFP and to contribute to the standardization of this assessment in clinical practice
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Young community of EACVI: the transition from EACVI Club 35 to Heart Imagers of Tomorrow: a promising yet challenging step.
peer reviewedThe purpose of this review is to summarize the activity and potential of the young community of European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging and to highlight the transition from Club 35 to 'Heart Imagers of tomorrow'
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