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Letters to the Editor

Reply to Ovroutski and Alexi-Meskishvili

^a Cardiac Morphology Unit, Imperial College London, National Heart & Lung Institute, London, UK
^b Department of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery, Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust, London, UK
^c Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, National Cardiovascular Center, Osaka, Japan

Received 17 January 2008; accepted 21 January 2008.

^_* Corresponding author. Address: Cardiovascular Surgery Department, National Cardiovascular Center, 5-7-1 Fujishirodai, Suita, Osaka 565-8565, Japan. Tel.: +81 6 6833 5012; fax: +81 6 6872 7486. (Email: yagihara@hsp.ncvc.go.jp).

Key Words: Fontan operation • Pulmonary arterial size • Nakata index • Lower lobe index

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

We greatly appreciate the comments by Ovroutski and Alexi-Meskishvili [1] concerning our article [2]. It should be worth noting that the lower lobe index (LLI) of the pulmonary artery (PA), first introduced by Dr Reddy et al. [3], would be more informative than the PA index in the context of a staged Fontan completion because the lower lobe is beyond the surgeon's reach and hence has fewer confounding factors. This was particularly true in the days . . . [Full Text of this Article]