Association of troponin T and altered lipid profile in patients admitted with acute myocardial infarction

OBJECTIVE

To determine whether elevated levels of troponin T are associated with altered lipid profile.

METHODS

Data were collected from 205 patients each of whom presented elevated troponin T levels.

RESULTS

195 patients presented with suspected myocardial infarction, 10 patients did not. Of which 68 had medium, 107 high and 20 presented with very high troponin T levels. The proportions were significantly different (p = 0.000215). Regression analysis showed that troponin T level was a useful quadratic predictor of total cholesterol (p = 0.000), triglycerides (p = 0.003), and low density cholesterol (p = 0.000); and a useful linear predictor of TC/HC ratio (p = 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS

The occurrence of myocardial infarction is associated with elevated troponin T levels; troponin T is positively correlated with total cholesterol, triglycerides, LDL and TC/HC ratio and negatively correlated with HDL. TC/HC ratio was not found to be a useful predictor of the likelihood of MI.

Restoration of images from the scanning-tunneling microscope

During the acquisition of an image from any probe microscope instrument, various noise sources cause distortion in the observed image. It is often the case that impulsive disturbances cause bright groups of pixels to replace the actual image data in these locations. Furthermore, the images from a probe microscope show some amount of blurring caused both by the instrument function and the material properties. In almost all image-processing applications it is important to remove any impulsive distortion that may be present before deblurring can be attempted. We give a technique for detecting these impulses and reconstructing the image. This technique is superior to the standard global application of median filters for the case considered. The reconstruction is limited only to the affected regions and therefore results in a much sharper and more meaningful image. With the assumption of Gaussian blur it is then possible to propose several different deblurring methodologies. We present a novel Wiener-filter deblurring implementation and compare it to both maximum-entropy and Richardson-Lucy deblurring.