Noninvasive Self-Gated Magnetic Resonance Cardiac Imaging of Developing Chick Embryos In Ovo

Abstract

The chick embryo is a well-known model for cardiovascular research, in which it is commonly used for the study of cardiac development, though not to date cardiac function. In other animal models, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has evolved into a major noninvasive tool to study healthy and diseased hearts, for instance in assessing left ventricular function (ejection fraction, myocardial mass, and wall thickness) and infarct size and in assessing anatomic abnormalities. The lack of MRI application to chick embryos is partly due to the difficulty of monitoring chick ECG and respiration signals, which are conventionally essential in acquiring images free of motion artifact, by prospectively triggering the MR scanner. In the present study, we remove these obstacles by employing a self-gated cine MRI protocol that incorporates a navigator-based retrospective gating technique. The navigator signal …