Abstract
The purpose of this work was to use noninvasive in vivo MRI to characterize the substrate (i.e., known as gray zone, GZ) of ventricular arrhythmia, a major cause of sudden death. Our aim was to use a preclinical model of chronic infarction to study the structural and molecular characteristics of infarcted areas. For this, we related parametric T1 maps with the density of collagen and gap junctions (Cx43 proteins) in patchy fibrosis in n = 6 swine with chronic infarction. Specifically, in vivo T1 relaxation maps were calculated from 2D multi-contrast late enhancement (MCLE) MR images obtained at 1 × 1 × 5 mm resolution. Quantitative analysis and regression analysis demonstrated that the comparison between GZ and scar extent in MCLE to the corresponding areas identified in histology, yielded very good correlations in both cases (i.e., goodness of fit: R2 = 0.89 for GZ, and 0.92 for dense scar, respectively). Furthermore, the gap junction Cx43 density was significantly reduced (i.e., by > 50%) in the ischemic GZ areas determined from MCLE. These novel results suggest that in vivo 2D parametric T1 maps can be used to evaluate the biophysical properties of healing myocardium post-infarction, and to distinguish between the infarct categories (i.e., scar vs. GZ) with re-modelled structural and electrical characteristics.
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Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank preclinical veterinary technicians at Sunnybrook for help with the infarct creation and MR studies. This work was financially supported by a CIHR grant (MOP #93531).
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Pop, M., Oduneye, S., Zhang, L., Newbigging, S., Wright, G. (2017). In Vivo Parametric T1 Maps Correlate with Structural and Molecular Characteristics of Focal Fibrosis. In: Pop, M., Wright, G. (eds) Functional Imaging and Modelling of the Heart. FIMH 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10263. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59448-4_2
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