Quantification of left ventricular volumes and ejection fraction from gated 99mTc-MIBI SPECT: validation of an elastic surface model approach in comparison to cardiac magnetic resonance imaging

PET has become an important noninvasive imaging technique in cardiovascular research for the characterization of mouse models in vivo. This modality offers unique insight into biochem-ical changes on amolecular level, with excellent sensitivity. How-ever, morphologic and functional changes may be of equal importance for a thorough assessment of left ventricular (LV) pathophysiology. Although echocardiography and MRI are widely considered the imaging techniques of choice for the as-sessment of these parameters, their use with PET considerably increasesstudycomplexityanddecreasescost- and time-efficiency. In this study, a novel method for the additional quantification of LV volumes and ejection fraction (EF) from PET was evaluated using cardiacMRI as the referencemethod.Methods:The radio-labeled glucose derivative 18F-FDG was injected into 33 mice (6 mice with previous permanent occlusion of the left anterio