Hell J Nucl Med
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Biography Historical Article
The philosophic and biological views of the "atomic" philosophers, Leucippus and Democritus.
The purpose of this study was to describe and highlight the work of the so called "atomic" philosophers Leucippus and in particular, his student Democritus, after an extensive research of works written by numerous ancient Greek philosophers and historians. The work of these two philosophers is groundbreaking, covers a wide spectrum of science and humanities and shows their high level of scholarship, erudition, and analytical thinking. Their ideas are often mentioned by other ancient Greek philosophers, with positive and sometimes negative criticism. Their theories were spread later, in ancient Rome, Byzantium, the Medieval Western Europe and in our times.
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This study aimed to determine systolic dysfunction and estimate resting left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) from information collected during routine evaluation of patients with suspected or known coronary heart disease. This approach was then compared to gated single photon emission tomography (SPET). Patients having undergone stress (201)Tl myocardial perfusion imaging followed by equilibrium radionuclide angiography (ERNA) were separated into derivation (n=954) and validation (n=309) groups. ⋯ The average LVEF was a better discriminator of systolic dysfunction than gated SPET-LVEF in receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis and identified more patients (89%) with a =10% difference from ERNA-LVEF than gated SPET (65%, P=0.000). In conclusion, resting left ventricular systolic dysfunction can be determined effectively from simple resting ECG and stress myocardial perfusion imaging variables. This model provides reliable LVEF estimations, comparable to those from (201)Tl gated SPET, and can enhance the clinical performance of the latter.