Abstract
Few studies have evaluated myocardial perfusion and ventricular function in normal, growing rats. We, therefore, evaluated serial changes in cardiac perfusion and function during the growth of normal rats using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) with technetium (99mTc)-sestamibi. Gated SPECT was serially performed in six normal rats. The left ventricular end-diastolic volume (EDV), end-systolic volume (ESV), stroke volume (SV) and ejection fraction (EF) were calculated with Quantitative Gated SPECT software. The perfusion distribution was calculated as the percentage uptake of each of the 17 segments using Quantitative Perfusion SPECT software. As expected, the body weight (BW) of the rats increased with growth, but their heart rates (HR) did not change over time. EF decreased very slowly over time and showed a negative correlation with BW. EDV, ESV and SV showed strong positive correlations with BW. There were no significant differences in the percentage segmental uptake in 13 of the 17 segments during growth, except for three basal and one apical segments. Therefore, a single normal database could be applied for the evaluation of perfusion abnormalities in rats of at least 8 to 28 weeks old.
Highlights
Few studies have evaluated myocardial perfusion and ventricular function in normal, growing rats
Animal models of several heart diseases such as cardiac infarction, cardiomyopathy, myocarditis and myocardial injury due to anticancer drugs, hypertension, or diabetes mellitus have been widely used for assessing their etiology and developing treatment strategy for each disease[1,2,3,4]. As these diseases in human are clinically diagnosed with both non-invasive and invasive examinations including electrocardiogram, echocardiogram, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), myocardiac perfusion scintigram, computed tomography (CT), cardiac angiogram and myocardial biopsy, these animal models have been evaluated by the same methods in previous studies[5,6,7]
Since animal hearts especially in rodents are very small and heart rate is very high compared with human, some non-invasive examinations used for human are hard to perform or have lower reproductivity and quantitativity for animal models
Summary
Few studies have evaluated myocardial perfusion and ventricular function in normal, growing rats. Animal models of several heart diseases such as cardiac infarction, cardiomyopathy, myocarditis and myocardial injury due to anticancer drugs, hypertension, or diabetes mellitus have been widely used for assessing their etiology and developing treatment strategy for each disease[1,2,3,4] As these diseases in human are clinically diagnosed with both non-invasive and invasive examinations including electrocardiogram, echocardiogram, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), myocardiac perfusion scintigram, computed tomography (CT), cardiac angiogram and myocardial biopsy, these animal models have been evaluated by the same methods in previous studies[5,6,7]. Of many non-invasive diagnostic modalities for animals listed above, myocardial scintigram is reported to be well reproducible and highly quantitative[8,9] This method is prevalent in clinical examination and there are several established software for cardiac function analysis in human, such as, Quantitative Gated SPECT (QGS; Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre, USA), 4D-MSPECT (4DM; Invia Medical Imaging Solutions, USA) and Emory
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