Tracheobronchial stenosis, a serious problem in adults and children, has multiple causes and has been treated in many ways. While developing an international multicentre study to evaluate efficacy of airway stents, it was realised that no adequate description of central airway stenosis regarding type, location and degree has been published. Thus, comparing results of different treatment modalities in different centres has been difficult due to a lack of uniformity of classification. Reports are typically descriptive and precise classification schemes have not adequately addressed either for the trachea or the main bronchi.A standardised classification scheme was proposed with descriptive images and diagrams for rapid and uniform classification of central airway stenosis. The present authors' system divides stenosis into structural and dynamic types and further classifies the disease by degree of stenosis, location and transition zone.Multiple sites can be described and each is transformed into a simple numerical scoring system prompted by a diagram, which can be easily captured for subsequent uniform analysis across sites.A pilot validation of the system, with 18 pulmonologists of varying training background, showed strong precision and agreement between observers. Such a system will enhance the ability to study the effectiveness of treatment modalities for central airway stenosis.

During development, mesodermal progenitors from the first heart field (FHF) form a primitive cardiac tube, to which progenitors from the second heart field (SHF) are added. The contribution of FHF and SHF progenitors to the adult zebrafish heart has not been studied to date. Here we find, using genetic tbx5a lineage tracing tools, that the ventricular myocardium in the adult zebrafish is mainly derived from tbx5a + cells, with a small contribution from tbx5a − SHF progenitors. Notably, ablation of ventricular tbx5a + -derived cardiomyocytes in the embryo is compensated by expansion of SHF-derived cells. In the adult, tbx5a expression is restricted to the trabeculae and excluded from the outer cortical layer. tbx5a-lineage tracing revealed that trabecular cardiomyocytes can switch their fate and differentiate into cortical myocardium during adult heart regeneration. We conclude that a high degree of cardiomyocyte cell fate plasticity contributes to efficient regeneration.

Microscopy of the beating heart in embryos provides key insights for the study of its development. However, achieving a sufficiently high framerate is difficult with conventional cameras. Here, we present a method to reconstruct an image sequence covering one heartbeat from images acquired over multiple cardiac cycles, with each image triggered at an arbitrary time, by sorting them according to their similarity. We formulate this task as a traveling salesman problem for which efficient solutions are available. We characterized our approach by evaluating its accuracy on synthetically generated data and sub-sampled high-speed movies of the beating heart in zebrafish larvae. We found that reconstructions are reliable when each phase produces a distinct image and when there are no abrupt cardiac motions, which amounts to collecting at least 100 images in a typical microscopy imaging scenario. We finally demonstrate that our method can be applied on data acquired with a fast confocal microscope, increasing its limited frame-rate by a factor 8.

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Successful upfront manual thrombus aspiration during primary PCI showed beneficial effects on the reduction of in-stent restenosis after bare metal stent implantation compared with standard PCI.

This study aimed to evaluate the quality of prescribing of cardiovascular medication by a criterion-based approach with reference to national treatment guidelines for the care of patients with diabetes mellitus. Case notes and database records of diabetic outpatients (age range 15-75 years) managed in a secondary care clinic of a major teaching hospital were reviewed and 23 criteria in a previously evaluated tool were applied to determine adherence to guidelines.For the 214 study patients (57.5% male, 69.6% type 2 diabetes mellitus), mean (SD) age was 52.2 (16.3) years and mean (SD) BMI was 30.3 (6.6) kg/m 2 . Overall guideline adherence was 74.0% (95% CI: 71.2, 76.8). Excluding criteria that were only applicable to less than 10% of the total study group, the three criteria with the highest adherence were 'use of metformin in overweight patients ': 95.1% (91.0, 99.3), 'use of statin in primary prevention of CHD': 94.3% (88.8, 99.7) and 'use of aspirin in secondary prevention of CHD': 93.8% (85.4, 100). Similarly, the three criteria with the lowest adherence were 'achievement of target blood pressure in patients on antihypertensives': 43.4% (34.2, 52.5), 'use of aspirin in primary prevention of CHD': 51.2% (35.9, 66.5) and 'use of ACE inhibitor in patients with defined risk factors ': 54.8% (44.7, 65.0). Among the overall level of non-adherence (26.0% of total applicable criteria) the proportion of criteria in which non-adherence was

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