One-year clinical outcomes in patients with very small coronary artery disease treated with drug-eluting stents: An observational study in the Indian population.

Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in very small vessel coronary arteries is challenging due to adverse short-term as well as long-term outcomes. This single-arm, open-label, observational study assessed 1-year clinical outcomes of drug-eluting stents (DES) in Indian patients undergoing PCI for symptomatic very small-calibre coronary artery disease. It enrolled 66 Indian patients with 74 very small coronary artery lesions (reference vessel diameter: ≥2.0 and ≤ 2.25 mm); eligible for implantation with 2.25 mm DES. The primary endpoint of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) was 3.0% indicating favourable 1-year clinical outcomes of DES in very small coronary artery lesions in Indian patients.

Beat-to-beat estimation of stroke volume using impedance cardiography and artificial neural network.

Impedance cardiography is a low-cost noninvasive technique, based on monitoring of the thoracic impedance, for estimation of stroke volume (SV). Impedance cardiogram (ICG) is the negative of the first derivative of the impedance signal. A technique for beat-to-beat SV estimation using impedance cardiography and artificial neural network (ANN) is proposed. A three-layer feed-forward ANN with error back-propagation algorithm is optimized by examining the effects of number of neurons in the hidden layer, activation function, training algorithm, and set of input parameters. The input parameters are obtained by automatic detection of the ICG characteristic points, and the target values are obtained by beat-to-beat SV measurements from time-aligned Doppler echocardiogram. The technique is evaluated using an ICG-echocardiography database with recordings from subjects with normal health in the under-rest and post-exercise conditions and from subjects with cardiovascular disorders in the under-rest condition. The proposed technique performed much better than the earlier established equation-based estimations, and it resulted in correlation coefficient of 0.93 for recordings from subjects with cardiovascular disorders. It may be helpful in improving the acceptability of impedance cardiography in clinical practice. Graphical abstract ᅟ.