Abstract
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) affect the myocardium and vasculature, inducing remodelling of the heart from cellular to whole organ level. To assess their impact at micro and macroscopic level, multi-resolution imaging techniques that provide high quality images without sample alteration and in 3D are necessary: requirements not fulfilled by most of current methods. In this paper, we take advantage of the non-destructive time-efficient 3D multiscale capabilities of synchrotron Propagation-based X-Ray Phase Contrast Imaging (PB-X-PCI) to study a wide range of cardiac tissue characteristics in one healthy and three different diseased rat models. With a dedicated image processing pipeline, PB-X-PCI images are analysed in order to show its capability to assess different cardiac tissue components at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. The presented technique evaluates in detail the overall cardiac morphology, myocyte aggregate orientation, vasculature changes, fibrosis formation and nearly single cell arrangement. Our results agree with conventional histology and literature. This study demonstrates that synchrotron PB-X-PCI, combined with image processing tools, is a powerful technique for multi-resolution structural investigation of the heart ex-vivo. Therefore, the proposed approach can improve the understanding of the multiscale remodelling processes occurring in CVDs, and the comprehensive and fast assessment of future interventional approaches.
Highlights
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) affect the myocardium and vasculature, inducing remodelling of the heart from cellular to whole organ level
To illustrate the different cardiac tissue characteristics that we can quantify, several relevant CVDs models were selected as an example: Wistar Kyoto (WKY) and left anterior descending artery (LAD) for the macrostructural analysis and WKY, spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR) and isoproterenol treated rats (ISO) for the microstructural assessment
An illustrative lower resolution (LR) PB-X-Ray Phase Contrast Imaging (X-PCI) image of a virtual cut along the longitudinal axis of the WKY and LAD hearts obtained after image reconstruction can be found in Fig. 2a,c, respectively
Summary
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) affect the myocardium and vasculature, inducing remodelling of the heart from cellular to whole organ level. To assess their impact at micro and macroscopic level, multiresolution imaging techniques that provide high quality images without sample alteration and in 3D are necessary: requirements not fulfilled by most of current methods. For the purpose of comprehensive structural assessment of cardiac tissue at different length scales, our methodology has been illustrated on several well-known rat models to study remodelling aspects of the myocardium under different CVDs. For myocardial infarction, isoproterenol treated rats (ISO) are a commonly used model[5,6]. After its ligation, these regions are deprived of perfusion, leading to (transmural) scar formation[8]
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