Common genetic coagulation variants are not associated with ischemic stroke in a casecontrol study

OBJECTIVE: Abnormalities in the coagulation pathway are often included in the diagnostic work-up of stroke patients, especially in young adults with cryptogenic stroke. METHODS: Three common genetic variants within the coagulation cascade were investigated in 500 control subjects and in 167 patients with ischemic stroke defined by TOAST subclassification. Analysed variants were factor V Leiden, prothrombin 20210G-->A and factor XIII Val34Leu. RESULTS: The factor V Leiden mutation was over-represented in patients with cardioembolic stroke for trend, whereas the prothrombin 20210G-->A variant and the factor XIII polymorphism Val34Leu were not associated with stroke of any subtype. The three polymorphisms showed no association with stroke in subgroups of patients defined by age (A and factor XIII Val34Leu is not a useful diagnostic procedure in the work-up of ischemic stroke

On Sampling Spatially-Correlated Random Fields for Complex Geometries

International audienceExtracting spatial heterogeneities from patient-specific datais challenging. In most cases, it is unfeasible to achieve an arbitrary levelof detail and accuracy. This lack of perfect knowledge can be treatedas an uncertainty associated with the estimated parameters and thus bemodeled as a spatially-correlated random field superimposed to them. Inorder to quantify the effect of this uncertainty on the simulation outputs,it is necessary to generate several realizations of these random fields.This task is far from trivial, particularly in the case of complex geometries.Here, we present two different approaches to achieve this. In thefirst method, we use a stochastic partial differential equation, yieldinga method which is general and fast, but whose underlying correlationfunction is not readily available. In the second method, we propose ageodesic-based modification of correlation kernels used in the truncatedKarhunen-Loève expansion with pivoted Cholesky factorization, whichrenders the method efficient even for complex geometries, provided thatthe correlation length is not too small. Both methods are tested on a fewexamples and cardiac applications