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This article, titled "Coronary Plaque Quantification Using a New CT Imaging Software¿A Feasibility Study," discusses the potential benefits of using Cinematic Rendering (CR) visualization in detecting nonobstructive coronary plaques. The study included 26 patients who underwent cardiac surgery and had previous cardiac CT scans. The results showed that CR visualization correlated well with intraoperative palpation in quantifying the presence of plaques. The authors suggest that CR has the potential to improve the planning of coronary artery bypass surgery by allowing for easier interpretation of plaque localization. Further research will be conducted to validate these findings. [Extracted from the article]

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Extracorporeal membrane oxygenaton (ECMO) provides sufficient short-term life support in acute heart failure or low cardiac output. Femoral cannulation is the standard approach but can complicate recovery due to retrograde flow, incomplete unloading of the left ventricle and potential watershed phenomena. Access through the axillary artery might be beneficial. Therefore we investigated our data from 179 consecutive patients after ECMO with axillary cannulation. We retrospectively investigated 179 consecutive patients supported with ECMO after cardio-thoracic surgery between January 2014 and January 2019. Mean age was 67.0 ±10.9 years. Sixty patients (33.5%) were females. Seventy-eight patients (43.5%) were operated electively, 37 patients urgently (20.7%) and 64 patients (35.8%) needed an emergency operation. Patients requiring ECMO support after CABG surgery were 68 patients (37.9%), valvular surgery in 39 patients (21.7%), combined CABG and valvular surgery in 37 patients (20.6%), aortic surgery in 29 patients (15.6%) and others in 6 patients (3.3%). In 93 Patients (52%) ECMO was implanted intraoperatively due to impossible weaning from cardio-pulmonary bypass while in 86 patients (48%) ECMO was implanted postoperatively due to low cardiac output. A standardised protocol was used for the weaning process after myocardial recovery. Mean duration of ECMO support was 8.4±5.1 days. Mean intensive care unit stay was 18.8±15.8 days and mean hospital stay was 23.48 ±22.6. Subclavian bleeding occurred in 24 patients (13.4%) and femoral bleeding in 4 patients (2.2%), re-sternotomy due to bleeding in 20 patients (11.1%), ischemia of the upper limb in 11 patients (6.1%), lower limb in 13 patients (7.2%), renal replacement therapy was needed postoperatively in 150 patients (83.8%), intracerebral bleeding occurred in 9 patients (5.0%) and stroke in 19 patients (10.0%). Weaning from ECMO was successful in 87 patients (48.6%), hospital survival was achieved in 62 patients (34.6 %) and 1 year survival in 46 patients (25.7 %). Our study shows that ECMO with axillary cannulation is feasible and safe with low complication rates and acceptable short term outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Chronobiology is the scientific field focused on studying periodicity in biological processes. In mammals, most physiological variables exhibit circadian rhythmicity, such as metabolism, body temperature, locomotor activity, and sleep. The biological rhythmicity can be statistically evaluated by examining the time series and extracting parameters that correlate to the period of oscillation, its amplitude, phase displacement, and overall variability., New Method: We have developed a library called CircadiPy, which encapsulates methods for chronobiological analysis and data inspection, serving as an open-access toolkit for the analysis and interpretation of chronobiological data. The package was designed to be flexible, comprehensive and scalable in order to assist research dealing with processes affected or influenced by rhythmicity., Results: The results demonstrate the toolkit's capability to guide users in analyzing chronobiological data collected from various recording sources, while also providing precise parameters related to the circadian rhythmicity., Comparison With Existing Methods: The analysis methodology from this proposed library offers an opportunity to inspect and obtain chronobiological parameters in a straightforward and cost-free manner, in contrast to commercial tools., Conclusions: Moreover, being an open-source tool, it empowers the community with the opportunity to contribute with new functions, analysis methods, and graphical visualizations given the simplified computational method of time series data analysis using an easy and comprehensive pipeline within a single Python object., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Marcio Flavio Dutra Moraes reports financial support was provided by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais. Paula Bargi-Souza reports financial support was provided by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais. Joao Pedro Carvalho-Moreira reports financial support was provided by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais. Marcio Flavio Dutra Moraes reports financial support was provided by Lemann Brazil Research Fund. Leonardo de Oliveira Guarnieri reports financial support was provided by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais. Marcio Flavio Dutra Moraes reports financial support was provided by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico. Paula Bargi-Souza reports financial support was provided by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico. Marcio Flavio Dutra Moraes reports financial support was provided by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Background: Increasing arterial stiffness is a prominent feature of the aging cardiovascular system. Arterial stiffening leads to fundamental alterations in central hemodynamics with widespread detrimental implications for organ function resulting in significant morbidity and death, and specific therapies to address the underlying age-related structural arterial remodeling remain elusive. The present study investigates the potential of the recently clinically available dual angiotensin receptor-neprilysin inhibitor (ARNI) sacubitril/valsartan (LCZ696) to counteract age-related arterial fibrotic remodeling and stiffening in 1-year-old mice., Methods and Results: Treatment of in 1-year-old mice with ARNI (sacubitril/valsartan), in contrast to angiotensin receptor blocker monotherapy (valsartan) and vehicle treatment (controls), significantly decreases structural aortic stiffness (as measured by in vivo pulse-wave velocity and ex vivo aortic pressure myography). This phenomenon appears, at least partly, independent of (indirect) blood pressure effects and may be related to a direct antifibrotic interference with aortic smooth muscle cell collagen production. Furthermore, we find aortic remodeling and destiffening due to ARNI treatment to be associated with improved parameters of cardiac diastolic function in aged mice., Conclusions: This study provides preclinical mechanistic evidence indicating that ARNI-based interventions may counteract age-related arterial stiffening and may therefore be further investigated as a promising strategy to improve cardiovascular outcomes in the elderly.

Background: Cardiovascular research heavily relies on mouse (Mus musculus) models to study disease mechanisms and to test novel biomarkers and medications. Yet, applying these results to patients remains a major challenge and often results in noneffective drugs. Therefore, it is an open challenge of translational science to develop models with high similarities and predictive value. This requires a comparison of disease models in mice with diseased tissue derived from humans., Results: To compare the transcriptional signatures at single-cell resolution, we implemented an integration pipeline called OrthoIntegrate, which uniquely assigns orthologs and therewith merges single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) RNA of different species. The pipeline has been designed to be as easy to use and is fully integrable in the standard Seurat workflow.We applied OrthoIntegrate on scRNA-seq from cardiac tissue of heart failure patients with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) and scRNA-seq from the mice after chronic infarction, which is a commonly used mouse model to mimic HFrEF. We discovered shared and distinct regulatory pathways between human HFrEF patients and the corresponding mouse model. Overall, 54% of genes were commonly regulated, including major changes in cardiomyocyte energy metabolism. However, several regulatory pathways (e.g., angiogenesis) were specifically regulated in humans., Conclusions: The demonstration of unique pathways occurring in humans indicates limitations on the comparability between mice models and human HFrEF and shows that results from the mice model should be validated carefully. OrthoIntegrate is publicly accessible (https://github.com/MarianoRuzJurado/OrthoIntegrate) and can be used to integrate other large datasets to provide a general comparison of models with patient data., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press GigaScience.)