The thickness of atrial myocardium, the ramus circumflexus sometimes very close to the endocardium, a myocardial sleeve around the coronary sinus, and local cooling by atrial arteries and veins may complicate the creation of conduction block in the mitral isthmus.

A fully automatic method for whole heart and cardiac chamber segmentation was presented and evaluated using multicenter/multivendor CTA data. The accuracy and robustness of the method were demonstrated by successfully applying the method to 1420 multicenter/ multivendor data sets.

Background and Purpose-Although collateral vessels have been shown to be an important prognostic factor in acute ischemic stroke, patients with lack of collaterals on standard imaging techniques may still have good clinical outcome. We postulate that in these cases collateral vessels are present though not visible on standard imaging techniques that are based on a single time frame. Methods-This study included 40 consecutive patients with acute ischemic stroke with a large-vessel occlusion. Standard computed tomography angiography (CTA, single time frame) and CT perfusion (multiple time frames) were obtained at admission and timing-invariant (TI)-CTA was created from the CT perfusion data. Clinical outcome data (modified Rankin Scale) were assessed at 3-month follow-up. Four experienced observers independently assessed collateral status twice on both standard CTA and TI-CTA in an independent, blinded, randomized manner. Collateral status was rated as good if ≥50% and poor if <50% of collaterals were present compared with the contralateral hemisphere. Results-Collateral status was rated higher on TI-CTA (good in 84%) compared with standard CTA (good in 49%; P<0.001).Thirty-one percent of patients with poor collateral status on standard CTA still had good clinical outcome. All of those patients, however, showed good collaterals on TI-CTA. All cases with poor collateral status rated on TI-CTA had poor clinical outcome. Conclusions-Collateral

Noise filtering techniques that maintain image contrast while decreasing image noise have the potential to optimize the quality of computed tomography (CT) images acquired at reduced radiation dose. In this paper, a hybrid diffusion filter with continuous switch (HDCS) is introduced, which exploits the benefits of three-dimensional edge-enhancing diffusion (EED) and coherence-enhancing diffusion (CED). Noise is filtered, while edges, tubular structures, and small spherical structures are preserved. From ten high dose thorax CT scans, acquired at clinical doses, ultra low dose ( 15 mAs ) scans were simulated and used to evaluate and compare HDCS to other diffusion filters, such as regularized Perona-Malik diffusion and EED. Quantitative results show that the HDCS filter outperforms the other filters in restoring the high dose CT scan from the corresponding simulated low dose scan. A qualitative evaluation was performed on filtered real low dose CT thorax scans. An expert observer scored artifacts as well as fine structures and was asked to choose one of three scans (two filtered (blinded), one unfiltered) for three different settings (trachea, lung, and mediastinal). Overall, the HDCS filtered scan was chosen most often.