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Additional file 2. Questionnaire on cardiovascular risk factors of female physicians.

Additional file 1. The 52 participating centers of this study.

In order to overcome drawbacks in manual identification of vulnerable atherosclerotic plaques,a method for automatic identification of vulnerable plaques is proposed based on computerized analysis of intravascular ultrasound images.First,the Contourlet transform is combined with the Snake model to segment images and detect lumen borders and external elastic membranes.Two categories of new features representing texture and elasticity of plaques are then automatically extracted to quantitate the features of plaques.The texture features consist of first-order statistics and features from the gray-level coocurrence matrix,and the elastic features are extracted from strain tensors estimated by nonrigid image registration.Finally,three types of features are used to design classifiers including Fisher linear discrimination,support vector machines,and generalized relevance learning vector quantization.The experimental results on 124 plaques,consisting of 36 vulnerable and 88 nonvulnerable ones,reveals that 20 morphological features,24 texture features and 6 elastic features has significant difference(P0.05) between the two types of plaques.The Support Vector Machine(SVM) outperformes the other two classifiers with the sensitivity,specificity,correct rate,and Youden's index of 91.7%,97.7%,96.7%,and 89.4%,respectively.Therefore,the proposed method can automatically and accurately identify vulnerable plaques.

High-density lipoprotein (HDL) possesses protective properties in cardiovascular diseases. However, the effect of HDL on the mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which could be mobilized to the damaged myocardial tissue, has not been well elucidated yet. In the current study, we investigated the effect of HDL on the proliferation of MSCs so as to reveal its molecular mechanisms. MSCs derived from rats were treated with HDL in different concentrations and for different periods. The proliferation of MSCs was measured with MTT and BrdU cell proliferation assay. The phosphorylation of Akt, ERK1/2 and the expression of p21 were evaluated by Western blotting. After the activity of respective pathways was down-regulated by the specific inhibitor and the gene of scavenger receptor-B type I (SR-BI) was knocked down by RNA interference, BrdU assay was performed to examine this effect of HDL on MSCs. We found that the proliferation of MSCs induced by HDL, in a time- and concentration-dependent manner, was the phosphorylation of Akt- and ERK1/2-dependent, which was significantly attenuated by the specific inhibitor to respective pathways. Moreover, MAPK/ERK1/2 pathway exerted a more dominating effect on this process. SR-BI contributed to HDL-induced proliferation of MSCs, which was effectively abolished by the silencing of SR-BI. The results suggested that HDL was capable of improving MSCs proliferation, in which MAPK/ERK1/2 and PI3K/Akt pathways involved and SR-BI played a critical role as well.

Objectives To assess the impact of thrombus aspiration (TA) upon high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) level and cardiac function in patients with STEMI receiving primary PCI. Methods A total of 832 patients with STEMI who underwent primary PCI were retrospectively enrolled. Among those patients, 537 cases received TA before balloon dilatation during PCI (TA group) and 295 cases did not receive TA therapy (control group). High sensitive CRP was measured at admission, on day 3 and 7, respectively. The peak level of cardiac troponin T (cTNT) and incidence of the major adverse cardiac event (MACE) (defined as the composite of any death, non-fatal myocardial infarction and target vessel revascularisation) were clinically compared. Echocardiography was used to assess the left ventricular function within 1 week after the procedure and at a 6-month follow-up. Results In comparison with the control, TA group had significantly lower levels of hsCRP on day 3 ((18.36±6.27) mg/l vs (12.37±5.23) mg/l, p Conclusions The administration of thrombus aspiration during primary PCI in patients with STEMI may reduce hsCRP level, alleviating the injury of myocardium, followed by an improvement of LVFS at a 1-year follow-up.