Increased serum lysyl oxidase-like 2 levels correlate with the degree of left atrial fibrosis in patients with atrial fibrillation

Atrial fibrillation (AF) progression is generally accompanied by increased atrial fibrosis and atrial structural remodeling. Lysyl oxidase-like 2 (LOXL2) is known to play an important role in many fibrotic conditions, including cardiac fibrosis. The present study aimed to explore the relationship between serum LOXL2 levels and AF. Fifty-four AF patients and 32 control subjects were enrolled in the study. High-density three-dimensional electroanatomic mapping was performed, and mean bipolar voltage was assessed in AF patients. LOXL2 levels were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. All patients underwent echocardiography to assess left atrium size and left ventricle function. Serum LOXL2 levels were significantly elevated in AF patients compared with the control group (526.81 ± 316.82 vs 240.94 ± 92.51 pg/ml, P<0.01). In addition, serum LOXL2 level was significantly correlated with the size of the left atrium (LAD) (r2 = 0.38, P<0.01). Furthermore, the serum LOXL2 levels were significantly higher in AF patients with LAD ≥ 40 mm compared with those with LAD < 40 mm (664.34 ± 346.50 vs 354.90 ± 156.23 pg/ml, P<0.01). And the Spearman’s correlation analysis further revealed that the mean bipolar left atrial voltage was inversely correlated with the LOXL2 (r2 = −0.49, P<0.01) in AF patients. Multivariate regression analysis further demonstrated that serum LOXL2 [odds ratio (OR) 1.013, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.002–1.024, P<0.05] and LAD (OR 1.704, 95% CI 1.131–2.568, P<0.01) were independent predictors of AF. In conclusion, serum LOXL2 levels were significantly elevated and were correlated with the degree of left atrial fibrosis in AF patients

Myocardial Stunning-Induced Left Ventricular Dyssynchrony On Gated Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography Myocardial Perfusion Imaging

Objectives Myocardial stunning provides additional nonperfusion markers of coronary artery disease (CAD), especially for severe multivessel CAD. The purpose of this study is to assess the influence of myocardial stunning to the changes of left ventricular mechanical dyssynchrony (LVMD) parameters between stress and rest gated single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI). Patients and methods A total of 113 consecutive patients (88 males and 25 females) who had undergone both stress and rest 99mTc-sestamibi gated SPECT MPI were retrospectively enrolled. Suspected or known patients with CAD were included if they had exercise stress MPI and moderate to severe myocardial ischemia. Segmental scores were summed for the three main coronary arteries according to standard myocardial perfusion territories, and then regional perfusion, wall motion, and wall thickening scores were measured. Myocardial stunning was defined as both ischemia and wall dysfunction within the same coronary artery territory. Patients were divided into the stunning group (n=58) and nonstunning group (n=55). Results There was no significant difference of LVMD parameters between stress and rest in the nonstunning group. In the stunning group, phase SD and phase histogram bandwidth of contraction were significantly larger during stress than during rest (15.05±10.70 vs. 13.23±9.01 and 46.07±34.29 vs. 41.02±32.16, PP\u3c0.05). Conclusion Both systolic and diastolic LVMD parameters deteriorate with myocardial stunning. This kind of change may have incremental values to diagnose CAD

Comparison of left ventricular mechanical dyssynchrony parameters between exercise and adenosine triphosphate stress tests using gated single-photon emission computed tomography myocardial perfusion imaging

Background Left ventricular mechanical dyssynchrony (LVMD) can be induced after stress test. However, no studies have compared the influence of different stress-inducing methods on LVMD parameters. aims The aim of the study was to determine whether there is a difference between exercise and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) stress tests in terms of changes in LVMD parameters assessed using gated single-photon emission computed tomography myocardial perfusion imaging (GSPECT MPI). methods A total of 190 patients who underwent 99mTc-sestamibi GSPECT MPI were consecutively enrolled. Treadmill exercise and ATP stress tests were performed in 95 patients each. Normal myocardial perfusion was defined as the summed stress score (SSS) ≤3 and summed rest score (SRS) ≤3, myocardial ischemia as SSS \u3e3 and SRS ≤3, and myocardial infarction as SSS \u3e3 and SRS \u3e3. Parameters of LVMD, including phase standard deviation (PSD), phase bandwidth (PBW), skewness, and kurtosis were compared. Subtraction was made between values during stress and rest phases to acquire ∆PSD, ∆PBW, ∆skewness, and ∆kurtosis. results There were no differences in LVMD parameters between the exercise and ATP groups. The same results were obtained in the normal perfusion, ischemia, and infarction subgroups. Furthermore, no differences were observed in ∆PSD (median [interquartile range, IQR], 0.25 [-2.3 to 3.1] vs 0.42 (-1.7 to 3.1]; P = 0.73), ∆PBW (median [IQR], 1 [-7 to 11] vs 1 [-6 to 11]; P = 0.95), ∆skewness (mean [SD], -0.06 [0.63] vs 0 [0.81]; P= 0.53), and ∆kurtosis (median [IQR], -0.47 [-4.2 to 4.3] vs -0.42 [-4.8 to 5.2]; P= 0.73) between the exercise and ATP stress-inducing methods. conclusions There are no differences between the exercise and ATP stress tests in terms of changes in LVMD parameters. Thus, the 2 methods can be used alternatively

Development and Validation of a New Method to Diagnose Apical Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy By Gated Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography Myocardial Perfusion Imaging

Aim The aim of this study is to develop and validate a new method to diagnose apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (AHCM) by the integral quantitative analysis of myocardial perfusion and wall thickening from gated single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI). Patients and methods Twenty-two consecutive patients, who showed T wave inversion of at least 3 mm in precordial leads and sinus rhythm in ECG, were enrolled. All the patients underwent cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), gated rest SPECT MPI and echocardiography. According to CMR diagnostic results, 13 patients were categorized as in the AHCM group and the remaining nine patients were categorized as in the non-AHCM group. Operators who were blinded to the CMR diagnosis independently performed the diagnosis by gated SPECT MPI. The regions of interest inside the apical hotspots on the perfusion polar map were drawn and the mean values of wall thickening in the drawn region of interests were calculated. Using MRI diagnosis as the gold standard, AHCM was diagnosed based on receiver operating characteristic analysis of the mean wall thickening in the apical perfusion hotspot. The area under curve, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of our method were 0.97, 100, 89, and 95%, respectively. Conclusion Our new method has high sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy against CMR diagnosis. It has great promise to become a clinical tool in the diagnosis of AHCM

A Learning-Based Automatic Segmentation and Quantification Method on Left Ventricle in Gated Myocardial Perfusion SPECT Imaging: A Feasibility Study

Background: The performance of left ventricular (LV) functional assessment using gated myocardial perfusion SPECT (MPS) relies on the accuracy of segmentation. Current methods require manual adjustments that are tedious and subjective. We propose a novel machine-learning-based method to automatically segment LV myocardium and measure its volume in gated MPS imaging without human intervention. Methods: We used an end-to-end fully convolutional neural network to segment LV myocardium by delineating its endocardial and epicardial surface. A novel compound loss function, which encourages similarity and penalizes discrepancy between prediction and training dataset, is utilized in training stage to achieve excellent performance. We retrospectively investigated 32 normal patients and 24 abnormal patients, whose LV myocardial contours automatically segmented by our method were compared with those delineated by physicians as the ground truth. Results: The results of our method demonstrated very good agreement with the ground truth. The average DSC metrics and Hausdorff distance of the contours delineated by our method are larger than 0.900 and less than 1 cm, respectively, among all 32 + 24 patients of all phases. The correlation coefficient of the LV myocardium volume between ground truth and our results is 0.910 ± 0.061 (P \u3c 0.001), and the mean relative error of LV myocardium volume is − 1.09 ± 3.66%. Conclusion: These results strongly indicate the feasibility of our method in accurately quantifying LV myocardium volume change over the cardiac cycle. The learning-based segmentation method in gated MPS imaging has great promise for clinical use

A decoder architecture for advanced video coding standard

In this paper, we describe a VLSI architecture of video decoder for AVS (Audio Video Coding Standard). The system architecture, as well as the design of major function-specific processing units (Variable Length Decoder, Deblockding Filter), is discussed. Analyzing the architecture of decoder system and the feature of each processing unit, we develop a system controller combined the centralized and decentralized control scheme, which provides high efficient communication between the processing units and minimizes the size of interconnected buffers. A bus-arbitration algorithm named Token Ring algorithm is designed to control the allocation of the SDRAM bus. This algorithm can avoid the conflicts on bus and reduce the internal buffer size, and its control logic is simple. Our simulation shows that this architecture can meet the requirement of AVS Jizhu

Combining POS tagging, lucene search and similarity metrics for entity linking

Entity linking is to detect proper nouns or concrete concepts (a.k.a mentions) from documents, and to map them to the corresponding entries in a given knowledge base. In this paper, we propose an entity linking framework POSLS consisting of three components: mention detection, candidate selection and entity disambiguation. First, we use part of speech tagging and English syntactic rules to detect mentions. We then choose candidates with Lucene search. Finally, we identify the best matchings with a similarity based disambiguation method. Experimental results show that our approach has an acceptable accuracy

Experimental Study on Thermal Vacuum Environment Sensitivity of Spacecraft Antenna's Typical Failure

With the development of space applications, spacecraft antenna has become an indispensable part of any space system. The spacecraft antenna affects and constrains the performance and functionality of the entire wireless communication system as well as the entire spacecraft. Spacecraft antenna has to withstand the noise, vibration, shock and acceleration as launched, and weightlessness, high vacuum, radiation, extreme hot and cold alternating space environment on-orbit[1].The influence of different environmental factors on the typical failure modes of spacecraft antenna is different. The environmental adaptability of the spacecraft antenna depends mainly on its structural design, material, process and other factors. In this paper, the influence of different environmental factors on the typical failure modes of the spacecraft antenna is studied. The sensitivity analysis of the typical failure modes of the thermal vacuum environment is verified by experiments, which provides support for the development of the spacecraft antenna