The experimental results showed that our proposed method can detect the cardiac planes quickly and accurately. Our method is therefore beneficial to both patients and operators.

The results of this study provide a pattern of CAC distribution based on age and gender in asymptomatic Japanese subjects. This pattern was similar to that in Western countries, although the absolute CAC scores were lower. High CAC scores were associated with male gender, aging, dyslipidemia, and fasting glucose.

SummaryPulmonary thromboembolism (PTE) is a life-threatening disease which always presents in patients with deep vein thrombosis (DVT). There are few statements in guidelines regarding indications for anticoagulation based on the location of DVT. We investigated whether the relative risk of PTE depends on thrombus location and bleeding complications with anticoagulation therapy. Between January 1 and July 10, 2007, 461 patients underwent lower extremity venous ultrasound studies, and 129 patients were diagnosed as DVT (60 males, 66.9 ± 13.3 years). We retrospectively studied the incidence of PTE and bleeding complications associated with anticoagulation therapy. Average follow-up period was 536 ± 324 days. Above and below knee thrombosis was present in 60 and 69 patients, respectively. Warfarin was administered in 60 patients. Nine patients developed PTE. Multivariate analysis showed the absence of anticoagulation therapy and location of DVT (above knee) to be significantly correlated with onset of PTE (anticoagulation; P < 0.01, location; P = 0.02). However, the incidence of bleeding was not significantly different between above knee and below knee vein thrombosis (P = 0.72). In conclusion, below knee vein thrombosis carries a relatively low risk of PTE, but the incidence of bleeding complications does not depend on thrombosis location. This suggests that the indication of anticoagulation therapy should be based on DVT location. (Int Heart J 2013; 54: 166-170)

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Purpose: We evaluated the usefulness of an automatic slice-alignment method to simplify planning of cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) scans with a 3-tesla scanner.Methods: We obtained 2-dimensional (2D) axial multislice images using steady-state free precession (SSFP) sequences covering the whole heart at the end-diastole phase with electrocardiography (ECG) gating in 38 patients. We detected several anatomical feature points of the heart and calculated all planes required for cardiac imaging based on those points. We visually evaluated the acceptability of an acquired imaging plane and measured the angular differences of each view between the results obtained by this method and by a conventional manual pointing approach.Results: The average visual scores were 3.4 « 1.0 for short-axis images, 3.2 « 0.9 for 4-chamber images, 3.2 « 0.8 for 2-chamber images, and 3.3 « 0.8 for 3-chamber images; average angular differences were 5.8 « 5.1 (short axis), 7.7 « 5.7 (4-chamber), 11.5 « 6.7 (2-chamber), and 9.1 « 4.6 degrees (3-chamber). Processing time was within 1.8 s in all subjects.Conclusion: The proposed method can provide planes within the clinically acceptable range and within a short time in cardiac imaging of patients with various cardiac shapes and diseases without the need for high level operator proficiency in performing the examination and interpreting results.