Results from the PROSPECT clinical trial shed new light on the types of vulnerable plaque that are most likely to cause sudden, unexpected adverse cardiac events, and on the ability to identify them through imaging techniques before they occur.
The trial, Providing Regional Observations to Study Predictors of Events in the Coronary Tree (PROSPECT), is the first prospective natural history study of atherosclerosis using multi-modality imaging to characterize the coronary tree. The study findings were published in the January 20, 2011 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
“As a result of the PROSPECT trial, we are closer to being able to predict — and therefore prevent — sudden, unexpected adverse cardiac events,” said principal investigator Gregg W. Stone, MD. Dr. Stone is Professor of Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Director of Cardiovascular Research and Education at the Center for Interventional Vascular Therapy at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center and Co-Director of the Medical Research and Education Division at the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF).
The multi-center trial studied 700 patients with acute coronary syndromes (ACS) using three-vessel multimodality intra-coronary imaging — angiography, grayscale intravascular ultrasound (IVUS), and radiofrequency IVUS — to quantify the clinical event rate due to atherosclerotic progression and to identify those lesions that place patients at risk for unexpected adverse cardiovascular events (sudden death, cardiac arrest, heart attacks and unstable or progressive angina).
Among the discoveries of the trial are that most untreated plaques that cause unexpected heart attacks are not mild lesions, as previously thought, but actually have a large plaque burden and/or a small lumen area. These are characteristics that were invisible to the coronary angiogram but easily identifiable by grayscale IVUS.
Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, for the first time it was demonstrated that characterization of the underlying plaque composition (with radiofrequency IVUS, also known as VH-IVUS) was able to significantly improve the ability to predict future adverse events beyond other more standard imaging techniques.
“These results mean that using a combination of imaging modalities, including IVUS to identify lesions with a large plaque burden and/or small lumen area, and VH-IVUS to identify a large necrotic core without a visible cap (a thin cap fibroatheroma) identifies the lesions that are at especially high risk of causing future adverse cardiovascular events,” Dr. Stone said.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
ESA's Galileo satellite undergoes launch check-up at ESTEC
The first part of Europe’s global satellite navigation system is due to be launched over the next two years – a total of four Galileo In-Orbit Validation (IOV) satellites.
The following four years to 2015 will see Galileo brought up to its first operational configuration of 18 satellites in medium Earth orbit.
The venue for these tests is the ESTEC Test Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. This unique European facility combines a complete portfolio of space simulation facilities under a single roof.
“From the point of view of mechanical qualification, the Galileo IOV satellites are identical,” said Pedro Cosma, Assembly Integration and Testing engineer for Galileo.
“So we are employing one of the satellites for this qualification testing, the first to be built, known as the Protoflight Model (PFM). It will respond in practically the same way as the other Flight Models – FM2, FM3 and FM4.”
The satellites have been built by a consortium of European companies. Their payloads were designed, developed and assembled by EADS Astrium in Portsmouth, UK, with the overall satellite designed and developed by Astrium in Ottobrunn, Germany and assembled by Thales Alenia Space in Rome, Italy.
The first satellite will endure simulated launch vibrations on ESTEC’s Electrodynamic Shaker, followed by the sudden pyrotechnic shocks during separation from the launch vehicle.
NASA Video of Orion nebula
The Orion Nebula is a huge cluster of gas and dust 1350 light years away from Earth. It's been dubbed a "stellar nursery" because huge stars are formed there.
In the video above, you can watch a wide view of the constellation of Orion, then zoom in through Orion's sword.The clip ends with a new image of the nebula itself, revealed in intricate detail.
This image won seventh place in a recent photo competition run by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and is a composite of exposures through five different filters.
The competition invited amateurs to trawl through the observatory's raw data to find beautiful images that had been overlooked by professionals. It was transformed into a colour image by overall winner Ivor Chekalin. A gallery of his images can be seen here.
The image was captured with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory, Chile.
NASA Mars Recon Orbiter HiRISE Image: Chasma Boreale
The orbiter peers directly down at a dizzyingly steep cliff face in the Red Planet's polar regions.
The cliff, to the right of the image, is composed of layer upon layer of red dust and pale ice deposits which, like tree rings on Earth, preserve a record of the Martian climate.
Picture: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / NASA
SDO AIA Image: Solar Activity in ultra-violet range
Red gases are cooler (around 60,000 degrees Celsius), blue and green are warmer (more than 1 million degrees).
A solar flare is seen at upper left. Spacecraft like the Solar Dynamics Observatory allow us to 'see' wavelengths of light which would be invisible to human eyes.
In the ultraviolet the Sun's familiar face appears dark, but now we can see that it's surrounded by wispy streamers of gas and blotched with bright regions of intense solar activity, each the size of the Earth.
Picture: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / NASA / BARCROFT MEDIA
Richard Feynman Video: Explaining Magnets
Legendary physicist Richard Feynman talks about why it is so hard to answer certain science questions in layman terms
Doctor Feynman was one of the defining physicists of our time. He is commonly said to have made complex physics accessible to all, and his lectures were later published in a series of books such as “Six Easy Pieces” and “Six Not So Easy Pieces“.
He was often referred to as the “Great Explainer”, leading the BBC to produce a short series with him known as “Fun To Imagine” on key scientific concepts in the early 80s, such as this video. In fact, his lectures at the California Institute of Technology were so renowned that fellow academics, teachers and professors would often sit in to refresh their memory on important physical concepts.
Sadly, Richard Feynman passed away on 15 February 1988, but his legacy still remains.
Fruiting Bodies: Dictyostelium discoideum
Instead of consuming all the bacteria at a particular site, they save some to 'seed' at other locations where food is scarce.
The amoeba species lives in slime moulds in the soil, where they exhibit an unusual form of social reproduction.
Dictyostelium chooses social over sexual reproduction whenever it runs out of food.
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