title: 3Din vivoimaging of rat hearts by high frequency ultrasound and its application in myofiber orientation wrapping.
abstract: Cardiac ultrasound plays an important role in the imaging of hearts in basic cardiovascular research and clinical examinations. 3D ultrasound imaging can provide the geometry or motion information of the heart. Especially, the wrapping of cardiac fiber orientations to the ultrasound volume could supply useful information on the stress distributions and electric action spreading. However, how to acquire 3D ultrasound volumes of the heart of small animalsin vivofor cardiac fiber wrapping is still a challenging problem. In this study, we provide an approach to acquire 3D ultrasound volumes of the rat heartsin vivo. The comparison between bothin vivoandex vivogeometries indicated 90.1% Dice similarity. In this preliminary study, the evaluations of the cardiac fiber orientation wrapping errors were 24.7° for the acute angle error and were 22.4° for the inclination angle error. This 3D ultrasound imaging and fiber orientation estimation technique have potential applications in cardiac imaging.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Xulei
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Qin
authors.affiliation: Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Silun
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Ming
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Shen
authors.affiliation: Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Xiaodong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, GA ; Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Stamatios
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lerakis
authors.affiliation: Department of Pediatrics, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Mary B
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Wagner
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, GA ; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA.
authors.forename: Baowei
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Fei
keywords: In vivo 3D ultrasound imaging; cardiac fiber orientations; cardiac imaging; echocardiography; magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging (MR-DTI); small animal imaging