Abstract
Cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) imaging of mice is a valuable tool for the precise in vivo diagnosis and prognosis of heart defects. This detailed protocol describes the method of cardiac MR imaging in mice step by step. A series of MR images captures the contractile function of the mouse heart and post-processing of the image data yields morphometric parameters (myocardial mass, myocardial wall thickness, ventricular end-systolic and end-diastolic volume) as well as functional parameters (stroke volume and ejection fraction). This protocol may also serve as a starting point for MR imaging of rats, by using larger image dimensions (field-of-view) and MR hardware suitable for larger animals.
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Acknowledgement
The authors wish to thank Thomas Basse-Lüsebrink from Bruker Biospin MRI GmbH, Ettlingen, Germany, for providing the Ig-UTE image data.
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Ku, MC., Huelnhagen, T., Niendorf, T., Pohlmann, A. (2018). Cardiac MRI in Small Animals. In: García Martín, M., López Larrubia, P. (eds) Preclinical MRI. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1718. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7531-0_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7531-0_16
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