Right-sided cardiac valvular diseases have traditionally been considered less important than disease of mitral or aortic valve. However, severe tricuspid regurgitation could lead to right ventricle dysfunction and reduce patients' survival rate. In clinic setting, tricuspid valve disease should be paid more attention for patients with secondary tricuspid regurgitation caused by left-sided valvular surgery combined with irreversible annular dilatation increasing the risk of re-operation. In this review, we summarize the epidemiology, anatomy, pathology, diagnosis, ultrasound and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging findings in patients with tricuspid regurgitation.
Real-time free breathing cardiac cine imaging is a reproducible method with shorter acquisition time and without breath-hold for cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. However, the detection of end-diastole and end-systole frames of real-time free breathing cardiac cine imaging for left ventricle function analysis is commonly completed by visual identification, which is time-consuming and laborious. In order to save processing time, we propose a method for semi-automatic identification of end-diastole and end-systole frames. The method fits respiratory motion signal and acquires the expiration phase, end-diastole and end-systole frames by cross correlation coefficient. The procedure successfully worked on ten healthy volunteers and validated by the analysis of left ventricle function compared to the standard breath-hold steady-state free precession cardiac cine imaging without any significant statistical differences. The results demonstrated that the present method could correctly detect end-diastole and end-systole frames. In the future, this technique may be used for rapid left ventricle function analysis in clinic.
ObjectiveTo investigate the changes and clinical significance of cardiac structure and function evaluation by cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) for patients with pectus excavatum deformity at preoperation. MethodsWe retrospectively analyzed 54 patients (24 children and 30 adults) who underwent pectus excavatum surgery from June 2012 to June 2014. There were 48 males and 6 females at age of 7-33 (19.08±5.17) years. All the patients underwent CMR using 1.5 Tesla scanner for evaluation of compressing and displacement of the heart. The major and minor dimensions of right ventricle were measured. The right ventricle end-diastole volume (RVEDV), right ventricle end-systolic volume (RVESV), and right ventricle ejection fraction (RVEF) were also recorded and analyzed. ResultsThe heart compression and displacement occurred in 83.3% of the children group and 90.0% of the adults group. The extent of heart displacement in the adults was more serious than that in the children (76.86%±13.30% vs. 67.99%±8.15%, P<0.05). The structure of right ventricle were striking distorted because right atrum or right ventricule below valve ring was compressed locally, with the major dimension of right ventricle obviously increased, and the minor dimension of right ventricle obviously decreased. The indices of right ventricle major dimension and right ventricle minor dimension were 61.14±0.44 mm/m2 and 14.82±2.52 mm/m2 in the children, 49.54±15.40 mm/m2 and 18.90 ±3.14 mm/m2 in the adults. The RVEDV and RVESV were significantly higher in the adults than those in the children (139.09±29.08 ml vs. 121.50±31.27 ml; 73.61±16.05 ml vs. 64.92±19.28 ml; P<0.05). RVEF was similar between the children and the adults (45.29%±4.14% vs. 46.30±6.09%). The patients' symptoms disappeared after correction of pectus excavatum. ConclusionCMR is an useful method for evaluating right ventricular structure and functions in patients with cardiac compression and distortion by pectus excavatum before operation, which can bring strong indications for pectus excavatum repair surgery.
Cardiac lipoma is rare and benign entities of heart, and often discovered after autopsy incidentally because most patients remain completely asymptomatic. The symptoms of cardiac lipoma depend on their location and size within the heart, such as dyspnea, chest pain, arrhythmia, and even sudden death. Surgical interventions usually have good results. Up till now, there has been no any relevant large-scale randomized controlled trial, and even no precise guideline for treatment. Surgical procedures often depend on patients' clinical manifestations and changes of hemodynamics in cardiac vessels in order to relief the symptoms as well as abort the progress of the disease. Therefore, early diagnosis and close follow-up are necessary for timely treatment. This article aims to summarize the imageological examinations for cardiac lipoma, including echocardiography, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging along with their characteristics and advantages, in order to get better clinical strategies.
Cardiac magnetic resonance T2* mapping technique is a gradient echoes relaxation recovery sequence, being used to measure the iron metabolism abnormality clinically, such as myocardial iron of hemorrhage in acute myocardial infarction reperfusion injury, transfusion-dependent anemia, hemochromatosis and so on, which is supposed to be the main quantitative evaluation method for myocardial iron overload or deficiency with critical clinical value. This paper summarizes the technical and post-processing points of cardiac magnetic resonance T2* mapping and its clinical applications in diseases related to abnormal myocardial iron metabolism.
Taking advantages of the sparsity or compressibility inherent in real world signals, compressed sensing (CS) can collect compressed data at the sampling rate much lower than that needed in Shannon’s theorem. The combination of CS and low rank modeling is used to medical imaging techniques to increase the scanning speed of cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), alleviate the patients’ suffering and improve the images quality. The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is proposed for multiscale low rank matrix decomposition of CMR images. The algorithm performance is evaluated quantitatively by the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and relative l2 norm error (RLNE), with the human visual system and the local region magnification as the qualitative comparison. Compared to L + S, kt FOCUSS, k-t SPARSE SENSE algorithms, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve the best performance indices, and maintain the most detail features and edge contours. The proposed algorithm can encourage the development of fast imaging techniques, and improve the diagnoses values of CMR in clinical applications.
Due to the abnormal structure and function of the cardiac valves, cardiac valve disease gradually appears the expansion of left ventricular inner diameter and volume. When the left ventricular end-diastolic dimension and volume expand severely, it becomes a giant left ventricle. Surgical valve replacement is still one of the main treatment methods for this disease. The degree of postoperative ventricular recovery is closely related to perioperative mortality and long-term prognosis. However, the existing clinical preoperative assessment methods still cannot accurately predict the degree of postoperative left ventricular recovery and long-term prognosis of such patients, so it is difficult to determine the optimal operation timing and surgical methods for patients. Therefore, we reviewed the existing literature and discussed different evaluation methods of the giant left ventricle associated with valvular disease before surgery, so as to optimize the perioperative treatment of such patients, clarify the timing of surgery and improve the prognosis.
Cryptogenic stroke (CS) accounts for 25% of ischemic stroke. The etiology of undetermined stroke is unclear leading to untargeted secondary prevention, high recurrence rate, so the clinical burden of cryptogenic stroke is substantial. Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging can identify more occult cardiac embolism that cannot be identified by standard cardiac assessment based on its excellent spatial resolution and contrast, three-dimensional imaging capacity and ability to depict soft tissues, to accelerate the initiation of optimal secondary prevention and improve the prognosis of patients. This review summarizes the application of CMR in the field of CS in recent years. Based on the latest evidence of diagnosis and management strategies, this paper proposes a cardiac diagnostic examination plan for CS patients, thereby improving the secondary prevention strategy of CS patients and improving their quality of life.