ObjectiveTo summarize the mid-term follow-up results and postoperative aortic remodeling of treating blunt aortic injuries (BAI) with thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR).MethodsA retrospective study was conducted on BAI patients treated with TEVAR, who were admitted into the Department of Vascular Surgery in Zhongshan Hospital, Affiliated to Fudan University between September 2003 and December 2015. There were 15 males and 9 females at an average age of 45.6±14.0 years. The mechanism of BAI was mainly auto car crash. Totally 25 entry tears were detected and most of them were located at the aortic isthmus.ResultsTwenty-four BAI patients survived and eventually went through TEVAR. One patient died of pulmonary embolism 1 week post-TEVAR. Rate of technical success, clinical success and perioperative mortality was 100.0%, 95.8%, and 4.2%, respectively. Nineteen patients were followed up with a mean time of 35.1(13-87) months. All of them survived this period. Based on the follow-up imaging of CTA, 18 of them revealed no endoleak or stent migration, and 1 patient of transection still had perfusion of distal false lumen at the abdominal aorta. None of the aortic segments measured in this study showed expansion of ≥5 mm during follow-up. The aorta remodeled well in 94.7% of them.ConclusionTEVAR for treating BAI appears feasible with high rates of technical and clinical success rates. The mid-term follow-up results seems satisfying, but the long-term results are yet to be assessed with further follow-up.
Mitral valve disease is one of the most popular heart valve diseases. Precise positioning and displaying of the valve characteristics is necessary for the minimally invasive mitral valve repairing procedures. This paper presents a multi-resolution elastic registration method to compute the deformation functions constructed from cubic B-splines in three dimensional ultrasound images, in which the objective functional to be optimized was generated by maximum likelihood method based on the probabilistic distribution of the ultrasound speckle noise. The algorithm was then applied to register the mitral valve voxels. Numerical results proved the effectiveness of the algorithm.