Transcatheter closure of pfo and asd: Multimodality imaging for patient selection and perioperative guidance

Transcatheter closure of patent foramen ovale (PFO) and secundum type atrial septal defect (ASD) are common transcatheter procedures. Although they share many technical details, these procedures are targeting two different clinical indications. PFO closure is usually considered to prevent recurrent embolic stroke/systemic arterial embolization, ASD closure is indicated in patients with large left-to-right shunt, right ventricular volume overload, and normal pulmonary vascular resistance. Multimodality imaging plays a key role for patient selection, periprocedural monitoring, and follow-up surveillance. In addition to routine cardiovascular examinations, advanced neuroimag-ing studies, transcranial-Doppler, and interventional transesophageal echocardiography/intracardiac echocardiography are now increasingly used to deliver safely and effectively such procedures. Long-standing collaboration between interventional cardiologist, neuroradiologist, and cardiac imager is essential and it requires a standardized approach to image acquisition and interpretation. Peripro-cedural monitoring should be performed by experienced operators with deep understanding of technical details of transcatheter intervention. This review summarizes the specific role of different imaging modalities for PFO and ASD transcatheter closure, describing important pre-procedural and intra-procedural details and providing examples of procedural pitfall and complications

Confirming chemical clocks: asteroseismic age dissection of the Milky Way disc(s)

Investigations of the origin and evolution of the Milky Way disc have long relied on chemical and kinematic identifications of its components to reconstruct our Galactic past. Difficulties in determining precise stellar ages have restricted most studies to small samples, normally confined to the solar neighbourhood. Here, we break this impasse with the help of asteroseismic inference and perform a chronology of the evolution of the disc throughout the age of the Galaxy. We chemically dissect the Milky Way disc population using a sample of red giant stars spanning out to 2 kpc in the solar annulus observed by the Kepler satellite, with the added dimension of asteroseismic ages. Our results reveal a clear difference in age between the low- and high-α populations, which also show distinct velocity dispersions in the V and W components. We find no tight correlation between age and metallicity nor [α/Fe] for the high-α disc stars. Our results indicate that this component formed over a period of more than 2 Gyr with a wide range of [M/H] and [α/Fe] independent of time. Our findings show that the kinematic properties of young α-rich stars are consistent with the rest of the high-α population and different from the low-α stars of similar age, rendering support to their origin being old stars that went through a mass transfer or stellar merger event, making them appear younger, instead of migration of truly young stars formed close to the Galactic bar

Confirming chemical clocks: asteroseismic age dissection of the Milky Way disk(s)

Investigations of the origin and evolution of the Milky Way disk have long relied on chemical and kinematic identification of its components to reconstruct our Galactic past. Difficulties in determining precise stellar ages have restricted most studies to small samples, normally confined to the solar neighbourhood. Here we break this impasse with the help of asteroseismic inference and perform a chronology of the evolution of the disk throughout the age of the Galaxy. We chemically dissect the Milky Way disk population using a sample of red giant stars spanning out to 2~kpc in the solar annulus observed by the {\it Kepler} satellite, with the added dimension of asteroseismic ages. Our results reveal a clear difference in age between the low- and high-$\alpha$ populations, which also show distinct velocity dispersions in the $V$ and $W$ components. We find no tight correlation between age and metallicity nor [$\alpha$/Fe] for the high-$\alpha$ disk stars. Our results indicate that this component formed over a period of more than 2~Gyr with a wide range of [M/H] and [$\alpha$/Fe] independent of time. Our findings show that the kinematic properties of young $\alpha$-rich stars are consistent with the rest of the high-$\alpha$ population and different from the low-$\alpha$ stars of similar age, rendering support to their origin being old stars that went through a mass transfer or stellar merger event, making them appear younger, instead of migration of truly young stars formed close to the Galactic bar

The GALAH Survey: Chemical tagging and chrono-chemodynamics of accreted halo stars with GALAH+ DR3 and GaiaGaia eDR3

© 2021 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stab3504Since the advent of $Gaia$ astrometry, it is possible to identify massive accreted systems within the Galaxy through their unique dynamical signatures. One such system, $Gaia$-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE), appears to be an early "building block" given its virial mass $> 10^{10}\,\mathrm{M_\odot}$ at infall ($z\sim1-3$). In order to separate the progenitor population from the background stars, we investigate its chemical properties with up to 30 element abundances from the GALAH+ Survey Data Release 3 (DR3). To inform our choice of elements for purely chemically selecting accreted stars, we analyse 4164 stars with low-$\alpha$ abundances and halo kinematics. These are most different to the Milky Way stars for abundances of Mg, Si, Na, Al, Mn, Fe, Ni, and Cu. Based on the significance of abundance differences and detection rates, we apply Gaussian mixture models to various element abundance combinations. We find the most populated and least contaminated component, which we confirm to represent GSE, contains 1049 stars selected via [Na/Fe] vs. [Mg/Mn] in GALAH+ DR3. We provide tables of our selections and report the chrono-chemodynamical properties (age, chemistry, and dynamics). Through a previously reported clean dynamical selection of GSE stars, including $30 < \sqrt{J_R~/~\mathrm{kpc\,km\,s^{-1}}} < 55$, we can characterise an unprecedented 24 abundances of this structure with GALAH+ DR3. Our chemical selection allows us to prevent circular reasoning and characterise the dynamical properties of the GSE, for example mean $\sqrt{J_R~/~\mathrm{kpc\,km\,s^{-1}}} = 26_{-14}^{+9}$. We find only $(29\pm1)\%$ of the GSE stars within the clean dynamical selection region. Our methodology will improve future studies of accreted structures and their importance for the formation of the Milky Way.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The GALAH survey: chemical clocks

We present the first large-scale study that demonstrates how ages can be determined for large samples of stars through Galactic chemical evolution. Previous studies found that the elemental abundances of a star correlate directly with its age and metallicity. Using this knowledge, we derive ages for 214 577 stars in GALAH DR3 using only overall metallicities and chemical abundances. Stellar ages are estimated via the machine learning algorithm XGBoost for stars belonging to the Milky Way disc with metallicities in the range -1 < [Fe/H] < 0.5, using main-sequence turn-off stars as our training set. We find that stellar ages for the bulk of GALAH DR3 are precise to 1-2 Gyr using this method. With these ages, we replicate many recent results on the age-kinematic trends of the nearby disc, including the solar neighbourhood's age-velocity dispersion relationship and the larger global velocity dispersion relations of the disc found using Gaia and GALAH. These results show that chemical abundance variations at a given birth radius are small, and that strong chemical tagging of stars directly to birth clusters may prove difficult with our current elemental abundance precision. Our results highlight the need to measure abundances for as many nucleosynthetic production sites as possible in order to estimate reliable ages from chemistry. Our methods open a new door into studies of the kinematic structure and evolution of the disc, as ages may potentially be estimated to a precision of 1-2 Gyr for a large fraction of stars in existing spectroscopic surveys

Fifth European Dirofilaria and Angiostrongylus Days (FiEDAD) 2016

Peer reviewe

New insights into the biology, diagnosis and immune response to Dirofilaria repens in the canine host

: Dogs are the primary host for Dirofilaria repens, therefore it is mandatory to accurately diagnose the canine infection and to expand our current knowledge on parasite biology and the immune response of the infected host for a better prevention.Thus, the aim of the present study was to provide new insights from experimental infections of dogs with D. repens, focusing on the evaluation of: 1) the pre-patent period and 2) the antibody response against D. repens somatic antigens and against the Wolbachia endosymbiont. Briefly, on Day 0, twenty purpose-bred Beagle dogs were experimentally infected with 50 infective larvae (L3) of D. repens. Starting from Day 58 until the last day of the study (Day 281), blood samples were collected on a monthly basis for detection of antibodies against D. repens (Dr) and recombinant Wolbachia surface protein (rWSP) by non-commercial IgG-ELISAs. Additional samples were collected on Days 220, 245 and 281 for the detection of microfilariae (mff) using the modified Knott's test and biomolecular analysis, following two PCR protocols: Gioia et al. (2010; protocol A) and Rishniw et al. (2006- protocol B). The results were analysed by univariate statistical analyses using 2 × 2 contingency tables and K Cohen was calculated to assess the agreement among all the diagnostic techniques. Overall, the outcome of the study revealed that out of the 20 dogs experimentally infected with D. repens, 16 (80 %) were microfilaraemic, 17 (85 %) were positive at DNA detection in the blood, 18 (90 %) had D. repens antibodies and 16 (80 %) had Wolbachia antibodies on the last day of the study. The overall k agreement between Knott's and PCR protocol B was 0.442 (P = 0.0001) and increased throughout the study, reaching 0.828 (P = 0.0001) on Day 281. To the authors knowledge, this is only the second study reporting antibody response to D. repens somatic antigen in experimentally infected dogs. ELISA results showed that an antibody response develops before the onset of patency, and steadily increases with time. Results would suggest that the development of an immunological response to infection could lead to application in epidemiological studies, risk assessment and as an aid in the diagnostic approach in dogs, in particular for early infections without mff