doi:10.1155/2012/504037 Research Article Long-Term Left Ventricular Remodelling in Rat Model of Nonreperfused Myocardial Infarction: Sequential MR Imaging Using a 3T Clinical Scanner

Copyright © 2012 Muhammad G. Saleh et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Purpose. To evaluate whether 3T clinical MRI with a small-animal coil and gradient-echo (GE) sequence could be used to charac-terize long-term left ventricular remodelling (LVR) following nonreperfusedmyocardial infarction (MI) using semi-automatic seg-mentation software (SASS) in a rat model. Materials and Methods. 5 healthy rats were used to validate left ventricular mass (LVM) measured by MRI with postmortem values. 5 sham and 7 infarcted rats were scanned at 2 and 4 weeks after surgery to allow for functional and structural analysis of the heart. Measurements included ejection fraction (EF), end-diastolic volume (EDV), end-systolic volume (ESV), and LVM. Changes in different regions of the heart were quantified using wall thickness analyses. Results. LVM validation in healthy rats demonstrated high correlation between MR and postmortem values. Functional assessment at