SNF472, a novel anti-crystallization agent, inhibits induced calcification in an in vitro model of human aortic valve calcification.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether SNF472, the hexasodium salt of myo-inositol hexaphosphate (IP6 or phytate): 1. Inhibits induced calcification in cultured aortic valve interstitial cells (VIC) as an in vitro model of aortic valve stenosis and 2. Whether inhibition is different in VIC obtained from healthy and calcified aortic valves. VIC from healthy (n = 5) and calcified (n = 7) human aortic valves were seeded in basic growth medium, osteogenic differentiation medium alone, or in osteogenic medium with SNF472 (3, 10, and 30 µM) and cultivated for 3 weeks. Calcification was quantified spectrophotometrically after Alizarin Red staining. In VIC from calcified valves, a complete inhibition of calcification was observed with SNF472 concentrations of 10 and 30 µM (p < .01), significantly stronger than in VIC from healthy valves. When SNF472 was added to VIC after 1 week in osteogenic medium, 30 and 100 µM SNF472 inhibited the progression of ongoing calcification by 81 and 100% (p < .01), respectively. The same concentrations of SNF472 given after 2 weeks reduced calcification by 35 and 40% respectively (not significant). SNF472 inhibited both the formation and the progression of calcification with the strongest effect in VIC from calcified valves.

Anterior mitral leaflet curvature in the beating ovine heart: a case study using videofluoroscopic markers and subdivision surfaces.

The implantation of annuloplasty rings is a common surgical treatment targeted to re-establish mitral valve competence in patients with mitral regurgitation. It is hypothesized that annuloplasty ring implantation influences leaflet curvature, which in turn may considerably impair repair durability. This research is driven by the vision to design repair devices that optimize leaflet curvature to reduce valvular stress. In pursuit of this goal, the objective of this manuscript is to quantify leaflet curvature in ovine models with and without annuloplasty ring using in vivo animal data from videofluoroscopic marker analysis. We represent the surface of the anterior mitral leaflet based on 23 radiopaque markers using subdivision surfaces techniques. Quartic box-spline functions are applied to determine leaflet curvature on overlapping subdivision patches. We illustrate the virtual reconstruction of the leaflet surface for both interpolating and approximating algorithms. Different scalar-valued metrics are introduced to quantify leaflet curvature in the beating heart using the approximating subdivision scheme. To explore the impact of annuloplasty ring implantation, we analyze ring-induced curvature changes at characteristic instances throughout the cardiac cycle. The presented results demonstrate that the fully automated subdivision surface procedure can successfully reconstruct a smooth representation of the anterior mitral valve from a limited number of markers at a high temporal resolution of approximately 60 frames per minute.