Left atrial appendage closure with the Amplatzer cardiac plug in patients with atrial fibrillation

Percutaneous left atrial appendage closure (LAAC) has emerged as an alternative to oral anticoagulation (OA) for prevention of thromboembolic stroke in patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF).

Accidental closure of the left upper pulmonary vein with an Amplatzer atrial septal defect occluder

We report the clinical outcome of a 46-year-old man referred for percutaneous closure of an atrial septal defect under transthoracic echocardiographic and fluoroscopic guidance, whose upper left pulmonary vein was erroneously obliterated using an Amplatzer atrial septal defect occluder. Various medical conditions have been associated with pulmonary vein stenosis including dyspnea on exertion or at rest, cough, and hemoptysis. However, there were no short- or long-term symptoms in this patient.

Closure of apical access site after transapical, transcatheter paravalvular leak closure

The safety of percutaneous transapical mitral paravalvular leak (PVL) closure could potentially be enhanced by device closure of the ventricular access site. Percutaneous transapical PVL closure was performed. The 9F delivery sheath was pulled back, and a 6-mm Amplatzer muscular ventricular septal defect occluder was deployed at the apical puncture site. Immediate hemostasis was achieved. Total hospitalization was 9 days. New York Heart Association functional class was improved, hemoglobin and haptoglobin rose, while lactate dehydrogenase fell. Follow-up fluoroscopy and transthoracic echocardiography revealed a good functional result. Closure of the apical access site by means of an Amplatzer muscular ventricular septal defect occluder is feasible.

Seeing Spaces: An Eye-Tracking Study Of Speech Segmentation

Speech is often a multimodal process, presented audiovisually through a talking face. One area of speech perception influenced by visual speech is speech segmentation, or the process of breaking a stream of speech into individual words. Mitchel and Weiss (2013) demonstrated that a talking face contains specific cues to word boundaries and that subjects can correctly segment a speech stream when given a silent video of a speaker. The current study expanded upon these results, using an eye tracker to identify highly attended facial features of the audiovisual display used in Mitchel and Weiss (2013). In Experiment 1, subjects were found to spend the most time watching the eyes and mouth, with a trend suggesting that the mouth was viewed more than the eyes. Although subjects displayed significant learning of word boundaries, performance was not correlated with gaze duration on any individual feature, nor was performance correlated with a behavioral measure of autistic-like traits. However, trends suggested that as autistic-like traits increased, gaze duration of the mouth increased and gaze duration of the eyes decreased, similar to significant trends seen in autistic populations (Boratston & Blakemore, 2007). In Experiment 2, the same video was modified so that a black bar covered the eyes or mouth. Both videos elicited learning of word boundaries that was equivalent to that seen in the first experiment. Again, no correlations were found between segmentation performance and SRS scores in either condition. These results, taken with those in Experiment, suggest that neither the eyes nor mouth are critical to speech segmentation and that perhaps more global head movements indicate word boundaries (see Graf, Cosatto, Strom, & Huang, 2002). Future work will elucidate the contribution of individual features relative to global head movements, as well as extend these results to additional types of speech tasks.