Blunt trauma is uncommonly followed by intracardiac valvar injuries. The resulting valvar insufficiency rapidly or progressively leads to congestive heart failure or death unless surgically corrected. Three patients with sustained blunt chest trauma were found to have two aortic valve and one mitral valve ruptures. They had variable clinical courses. However, after the diagnosis was established, surgical intervention was attempted promptly, which consisted of two aortic valve replacements and one mitral valvoplasty. Their postoperative courses were uneventful. Careful observation and repeated physical examination, aided by echocardiography, were required after the blunt chest trauma.

Cardiomegaly is an asymptomatic disease. Symptoms, such as palpitations, chest tightness, and shortness of breath, may be the early indications of cardiac hypertrophy, which can be divided into cardiac hypertrophy and ventricular enlargement. Their causes and treatment strategies are different. The early detection of cardiomegaly can help to make decisions for administering drugs and surgical treatments. In addition, with regard to problems in manual inspection, such as time consuming and the need for human interpretations and experiences, an assistive tool is required to automatically develop and identify normal heart or enlarged hearts. Therefore, this study proposes the combination of 2D (two dimensional) and 1D (one dimensional) convolutional neural network based classifier for rapid cardiomegaly screening in clinical applications based on chest X-ray (CXR) examinations in frontal posteroanterior view. The 2D and 1D convolutional processes and multilayer connected classification network are used to enhance the original CXR image and to remove unwanted noises to increase accuracy in feature extraction and pattern recognition tasks. The training dataset and testing dataset are collected from the National Institutes of Health CXR image database, which is used to train the classifier and validate the performance of the classifier in a K-fold cross-validation manner. Experimental results indicate the potential performance for rapid cardiomegaly screening with regard to recall (%), precision (%), accuracy (%), and F1 score.

Patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) is a common cardiovascular complication that complicates clinical care in the intensive care of premature infants. Prenatal and postnatal infections and the inflammation process can contribute to PDA, and intrauterine inflammation is a known risk factor of PDA. A variety of inflammatory biomarkers have been reported to be associated with PDA. Chorioamnionitis induces the fetal inflammatory process via several cytokines that have been reported to be associated with the presence of PDA and may have a role in the vascular remodeling process or vessel dilation of the ductus. On the other hand, anti-inflammatory agents, such as antenatal steroids, decrease PDA incidence and severity in patients born to those with chorioamnionitis. Proinflammatory cytokines, which are expressed more significantly in preterm neonates and chorioamnionitis, are associated with the presence of PDA. In this review, we focus on the pathogenesis of PDA in preterm infants and the role of biomarkers associated with the perinatal inflammatory process.

We present a case of 58-year-old woman with underlying diabetes mellitus, hepatitis C virus-related liver cirrhosis, and total hysterectomy for uterine myoma 11 moths ago, who was diagnosed ruptured aortic arch mycotic pseudoaneurysm after a certain period of survey for her unknown fever cause. After emergent surgery with prosthetic graft interposition, all her blood cultures and tissue cultures revealed pathogen with Bacteroides fragilis. Although mycotic aneurysms have been well described in literatures, an aneurysm infected solely with Bacteroides fragilis is unusual, with only eight similar cases in the literature. Here we reported the only female case with her specific clinical and management course and summarized all reported cases of mycotic aneurysm caused by Bacteroides fragilis to clarify their conditions and treatments, alert the difficulty in diagnosis, and importance of highly suspicious.