In 1998, Philip Rubin, MD, a radiation oncologist from Rochester, NY, and I, an interventional cardiologist from Washington, DC, founded a new journal called Cardiovascular Radiation Medicine to serve as a unique platform for publications related to a new field of medicine, vascular brachytherapy, which had emerged in 1995. Vascular brachytherapy was a multidisciplinary field in which biologists, physicists, cardiologists, and radiation oncologists could identify, for the first time, a remedy for combating restenosis following intervention in coronary and peripheral vessels. This collaboration was precedent for merging multiple disciplines into a new field that was moving from bench to bed with the approval of radiation systems to be used for the treatment of in-stent restenosis in coronary arteries. In its first 3 years, the journal was dedicated solely to the field of vascular brachytherapy and was, by then, included in Index Medicus/Medline. With the introduction of drug-eluting stents, which resulted in the significant reduction of restenosis and the need for vascular brachytherapy for clinical use, in 2003, the scope of the journal had been expanded to include molecular interventions. Because the use of vascular brachytherapy has since been minimized, we believed it was time to change the journal's title to Cardiovascular Revascularization Medicine and expand its content once again.

A new editorial board has been assembled, and all topics related to cardiovascular revascularization will be included under the journal's new format. The submission process is now electronic, and we intend to publish six issues per year by 2006. We will continue to accept manuscripts pertaining to vascular brachytherapy; however, the journal will expand to include such topics as angiogenesis, cell therapy, pharmacological interventions, and restenosis management and prevention, including experiments conducted in human subjects, laboratory animals, and in vitro. We hope our readers will enjoy these changes, remain enthusiastic, and continue to contribute to the journal.

For our first issue under the journal's new name, we have three clinical original articles—the first by Mosseri et al., in which they performed a real-life multicenter registry to assess short- and long-term characteristics of the Titan stent. The next, by Ribichini et al., evaluates vascular brachytherapy as a potent antiproliferative treatment to prevent in-stent restenosis after coronary angioplasty of de novo lesions in patients carrying the D allele of the I/D polymorphism of the ACE gene and high ACE plasma levels. The last of our Clinical Original articles, by Fischell et al., reports one of the first clinical investigations to examine the ability of an intracardiac right ventricular electrode to identify the early onset of myocardial ischemia/injury in a cohort of patients undergoing balloon occlusion of a coronary artery during percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty.

Our Biology Original article was contributed by Samsam-Shariat and Movahed. In their study, authors measured the infarction zone in rats after ligation of the mid left anterior descending artery.

In the Physics Original submission, Dimmick et al. present the results of a study in which they suggest that surface skin exposures from gamma sources used in intravascular brachytherapy pose acceptable risks, considering the medical benefits of the procedures.

We also present two Case Studies in this issue. Patel et al. present three cases in which noninvasive coronary imaging provided important anatomical definition that was not easily obtainable from cardiac catheterization techniques, and Rigatelli et al. present an interesting case of uninfected perforation of an aortic cusp in a patient with a clinical and echocardiographic diagnosis of degenerative aortic steno-insufficiency and aneurysm of the ascending aorta.

A Clinical Review by Yan et al. reviews current evidence for drug-eluting stent implantation for the treatment of in-stent restenosis.

Again, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to our past editorial board and to our new board of editors, whom we believe will help to make Cardiovascular Revascularization Medicine a stronger and more influential journal to serve the cardiology community.