The potential role of MRI in veterinary clinical cardiology.
Over the last decade, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become established as a useful referral diagnostic method in veterinary medicine that is widely used in small animal brain and spinal diseases, aural, nasal and orbital disorders, planning soft tissue surgery, oncology and small animal and equine orthopaedics. The use of MRI in these disciplines has grown due to its unparalleled capability to image soft tissue structures. This has been exploited in human cardiology where, despite the inherent difficulties in imaging a moving, contractile structure, cardiac MRI (CMRI) has become the optimal technique for the morphological assessment and quantification of ventricular function. Both CMRI hardware and software systems have developed rapidly in the last 10 years but although several preliminary veterinary CMRI studies have been reported, the technique's growth has been limited and is currently used primarily in clinical research. A review of published studies is presented with a description of CMRI technology and the potential of CMRI is discussed along with some of the reasons for its limited usage.
Gilbert
Stephen H
SH
Multidisciplinary Cardiac Research Centre and Institute of Membrane and Systems Biology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. s.h.gilbert@leeds.ac.uk
McConnell
Fraser J
FJ
Holden
Arun V
AV
Sivananthan
Mohan U
MU
Dukes-McEwan
Joanna
J
D000818:Animals; D002371:Cat Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis*; D002415:Cats; D004283:Dog Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis*; D004285:Dogs; D006331:Heart Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000662:veterinary*; D006349:Heart Valve Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000662:veterinary; D006439:Hemodynamics; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000662:veterinary*; D009200:Myocardial Contraction / Q000502:physiology; D014730:Veterinary Medicine / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods