Quantification of myocardial deformation in children by cardiovascular magnetic resonance feature tracking: determination of reference values for left ventricular strain and strain rate

Background: The objective assessment of global and regional cardiac function in children has shown to be clinically relevant but is challenging to conduct. Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) has emerged as a valuable diagnostic modality especially in patients with cardiomyopathy or congenital heart disease. However, data on the normal cardiac deformation in children assessed by CMR is lacking at present. Thus, the aim of this study was to provide reference values for cardiac strain and strain rate in children and adolescents derived from CMR feature tracking (FT) measurements. Methods: In this binational study, eighty children and adolescents (age 0.4–18.0 years, 41 male, 39 female) free from cardiac diseases from two centers underwent CMR in 1.5 T whole-body scanners in supine position. Global peak radial, circumferential and longitudinal systolic strains as well as the corresponding early peak diastolic strain rates were assessed applying FT on short axis as well as 3- and 4-chamber views of standard cine steady-state free precession images. Results: The difference between genders yielded no significance for all assessed strains. Yet, all strains showed a significant parabolic relation to age and an even stronger one to body surface area (BSA). Therefore, BSA-specific reference values were determined using a polynomial regression model. The apical cardiac segments featured significant higher peak circumferential but lower peak radial systolic strains than the midventricular and basal segments (all p < 0.001). Conclusions: The assessment of cardiac deformation by CMR-FT is feasible in children. This is the first CMR study providing specific reference values for FT-derived strain and strain rate in the pediatric age range

Design and prototypical implementation of a method to transfer data of medical records to virtual patients

Virtual patients play an important role in medical teaching. The authors of virtual patients spend a lot of time to create virtual patients. Therefore, there is a great interest to generate virtual patients automatically using the content of medical information systems. This work researches the feasibility of requesting the relevant information from medical information systems. It furthermore implements a prototype system that requests medical data from the standardised HL7 FHIR interface and transfers it to the eViP format for virtual patients.Virtuelle Patienten spielen in der medizinischen Lehre eine wichtige Rolle. Die Autoren von Virtuellen Patienten benötigen viel Zeit für die Erstellung, es ist daher von großem Interesse, die Erstellung von Virtuellen Patienten automatisiert durchzuführen. Diese Arbeit untersucht, ob es praktisch möglich ist, die relevanten Informationen aus medizinischen Informationssystemen abzufragen und implementiert prototypisch ein System, das medizinische Dokumentationsdaten aus der standardisierten HL7 FHIR Schnittstelle abfragt und in das eViP-Format für Virtuelle Patienten überführt