Explore the vast range of titles available.

To quantify the impact of cardiac motion on stent length measurements with Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and to demonstrate in vivo OCT imaging of implanted stents, without motion artefacts. The study consists of: clinical data evaluation, simulations and in vivo tests. A comparison between OCT-measured and nominal stent lengths in 101 clinically acquired pullbacks was carried out, followed by a simulation of the effect of cardiac motion on stent length measurements, experimentally and computationally. Both a commercial system and a custom OCT, capable of completing a pullback between two consecutive ventricular contractions, were employed. A 13 mm long stent was implanted in the left anterior descending branch of two atherosclerotic swine and imaged with both OCT systems. The analysis of the clinical OCT images yielded an average difference of 1.1 ± 1.6 mm, with a maximum difference of 7.8 mm and the simulations replicated the statistics observed in clinical data. Imaging with the custom OCT, yielded an RMS error of 0.14 mm at 60 BPM with the start of the acquisition synchronized to the cardiac cycle. In vivo imaging with conventional OCT yielded a deviation of 1.2 mm, relative to the length measured on ex-vivo micro-CT, while the length measured in the pullback acquired by the custom OCT differed by 0.20 mm. We demonstrated motion artefact-free OCT-imaging of implanted stents, using ECG triggering and a rapid pullback.

Background: Extracorporeal therapies (ET) are increasingly used in pediatric settings as adjuvant therapeutic strategies for overwhelming inflammatory conditions. Although these treatments seem to be effective for removing inflammatory mediators, their influence on antimicrobials pharmacokinetic should not be neglected. Methods: A prospective observational study of children admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) with a diagnosis of sepsis/septic shock. All critically ill children received hemoadsorption treatment with CytoSorb (CS) in combination with CKRT. Therapeutic drug monitoring has been performed on 10 critically ill children, testing four antimicrobial molecules: meropenem, ceftazidime, amikacin and levofloxacin. In order to evaluate the total and isolated CKRT and CS contributions to antibiotic removal, blood samples at each circuit point (post-hemofilter, post-CS and in the effluent line) were performed. Therefore, the clearance and mass Removal (MR) of the hemofilter and CS were calculated. Results: Our preliminary report describes a different impact of CS on these target drugs removal: CS clearance was low for amikacine (6–12%), moderate for ceftazidime (43%) and moderate to high for levofloxacine (52–72%). Higher MR and clearance were observed with CKRT compared to CS. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report regarding pharmacokinetic dynamics in critically ill children treated with CKRT and CS for septic shock.

Pertussis continues to be a highly contagious respiratory infection, especially in children, with cyclical peaks of disease spread every three to five years. Here, we report relevant cases of B. pertussis infection between August 2023 and January 2024, and compare them with B. pertussis prevalence in pediatric patients admitted to the Reference Italian Pediatric Hospital, located in Rome, from January 2015 to July 2023. A total of 5464 tests for B. pertussis were performed during the study period, and 6.9% were positive. At the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a sharp decrease in the presence of B. pertussis, which reappeared only in August 2023, recording five new cases. All five children presented with paroxysmal cough 5 to 10 days before admission. Four patients had other mild respiratory symptoms and moderate B. pertussis DNA levels (Ct mean: 26). Only one child, with very high B. pertussis DNA levels (Ct: 9), presented with severe respiratory failure. The patients with mild/moderate infection achieved clinical recovery while the patient with the severe manifestation died of cardiac arrest. These observations highlight the reemergence of pertussis even in vaccinated countries and its association with morbidity and mortality especially in young children. This emphasizes the importance of rapid diagnosis to immediately implement appropriate treatment and monitoring of immune status.

The use of drugs in suicide attempts is becoming more and more frequent among adolescents. Intentional intoxication with propafenone is very rare and mainly reported in adults associated with other drugs. The therapeutic approach is symptomatic, since there is no specific antidote for propafenone. We present a pediatric case of intentional ingestion of 1.8 g of propafenone that caused refractory cardiogenic shock. The patient was successfully rescued with extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the emergency department of a secondary level peripheral hospital.

Linguistic research showed that the depth of syntactic embedding is reflected in brain theta power. Here, we test whether this also extends to non-linguistic stimuli, specifically music. We used a hierarchical model of musical syntax to continuously quantify two types of expert-annotated harmonic dependencies throughout a piece of Western classical music: prolongation and preparation. Prolongations can roughly be understood as a musical analogue to linguistic coordination between constituents that share the same function (e.g., ‘pizza’ and ‘pasta’ in ‘I ate pizza and pasta’). Preparation refers to the dependency between two harmonies whereby the first implies a resolution towards the second (e.g., dominant towards tonic; similar to how the adjective implies the presence of a noun in ‘I like spicy…’). Source reconstructed MEG data of sixty-eight participants listening to the musical piece was then analysed. We used Bayesian Mixed Effects models to predict theta envelope in the brain, using the number of open prolongation and preparation dependencies as predictors whilst controlling for audio envelope. We observed that prolongation and preparation both carry independent and distinguishable predictive value for theta band fluctuation in key linguistic areas such as the Angular, Supramarginal, Superior Temporal and Heschl’s Gyri, or their right-lateralised homologues, with preparation showing additional predictive value for areas associated with the reward system and prediction. Musical expertise further mediated these effects in language-related brain areas. Results show that predictions of precisely formalised music-theoretical models are reflected in the brain activity of listeners.

Examines progress of the European Monetary Union, European Central Bank, Euro Area, and related financial and policy issues; 12 articles. Contents: The assessment: EMU, four years on, by Christopher Allsopp and Michael Artis; The European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve, by Stephen Cecchetti and Róisín O'Sullivan; Asymmetric reaction functions for the Euro Area, by Paolo Surico; The effects of monetary policy in the Euro Area, by Michael Ehrmann, Leonardo Gambacorta, Jorge Martinez-Pagés, Patrick Sevestre, and Andreas Worms; New findings on firm investment and monetary transmission in the Euro Area, by Jean-Bernard Chatelain; Andrea Generale, Ignacio Hernando, Ulf von Kalckreuth, and Philip Vermeulen; Ten commandments for a fiscal rule in the E(M)U, by Willem H. Buiter; Revisiting EMU's Stability Pact: a pragmatic way forward, by Marco Buti, Sylvester Eijffinger, and Daniele Franco; On constraining fiscal policy discretion in EMU, by Antonio Fatás and Ilian Mikov; Designing and choosing macroeconomic frameworks: the position of the UK and four years of the Euro, by Ray Barrell and Martin Weale; Wage-setting and inflation targets in EMU, by Bob Hancké and David Soskice; Complementing EMU: rethinking cohesion policy, by Iain Begg; The Euro-area financial system: stucture, integration, and policy initiatives, by Philipp Hartmann, Angela Maddaloni, and Simone Manganelli.