Abstract
In vivo imaging has provided a unique framework for studying pathological progression in various mouse models of cardiac disease. Although conventional short-axis motion-mode (SAX MM) ultrasound and cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are two of the most prevalent strategies used for quantifying cardiac function, there are few notable limitations including imprecision, inaccuracy, and geometric assumptions with ultrasound, or large and costly systems with substantial infrastructure requirements with MRI. Here we present an automated 4-dimensional ultrasound (4DUS) technique that provides comparable information to cine MRI through spatiotemporally synced imaging of cardiac motion. Cardiac function metrics derived from SAX MM, cine MRI, and 4DUS data show close agreement between cine MRI and 4DUS but overestimations by SAX MM. The inclusion of a mouse model of cardiac hypertrophy further highlights the precision of 4DUS compared with that of SAX MM, with narrower groupings of cardiac metrics based on health status. Our findings suggest that murine 4DUS can be used as a reliable, accurate, and cost-effective technique for longitudinal studies of cardiac function and disease progression.
Highlights
Murine cardiac disease models have become the foundation for systematically studying mechanisms and factors that influence negative outcomes such as heart failure [1,2,3]
Ventricular chamber volumes defined by the endocardial border from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and 4-dimensional ultrasound (4DUS) data measured at end-diastole volume (EDV) and peak-systole volume (PSV) were used to calculate the left ventricle (LV) stroke volume (SV) and ejection fraction (EF)
The 4DUS and MRI methods did not produce significant differences in any of the used metrics, whereas the short-axis motion-mode (SAX MM) overestimated these values on average (Figure 3)
Summary
Murine cardiac disease models have become the foundation for systematically studying mechanisms and factors that influence negative outcomes such as heart failure [1,2,3]. We compared this technique against conventional SAX MM and cine MRI by using cardiac function metrics to assess their relative performance. Cardiac Function Assessment Using a custom MATLAB GUI and Vevo 3100 compatible VevoLAB analysis software (v3.0) for the MRI and 4DUS data, respectively, the endocardial and epicardial borders of the LV were manually outlined across short-axis views of the heart.
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