Morphological phenotyping of mouse hearts using optical coherence tomography

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Research
• Medical Imaging
• Computational Anatomy

Background:

• Transgenic mouse models are crucial for studying genetic cardiovascular diseases like Marfan syndrome (MFS).
• Characterizing cardiac morphology in small animal models is challenging due to heart size limitations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To adapt optical coherence tomography (OCT) for high-resolution imaging of fixed adult mouse hearts.
• To apply computational anatomy tools for detailed cardiac morphometric analysis.
• To evaluate the utility of this pipeline in comparing wild-type and Marfan syndrome mouse models.

Main Methods:

• Optical clearing and multi-perspective OCT imaging of fixed mouse hearts.
• Correction for refractive distortions, registration, and stitching of OCT volumes.
• Extraction of morphometric parameters including wall thickness, ventricular mass, and luminal volumes.

Main Results:

• Successful generation of high-resolution, whole-heart OCT volumes.
• Visualization of cardiac structures like valves and myofibril bundles.
• Quantification of cardiac morphology parameters in both wild-type and MFS mouse models.

Conclusions:

• Adapted OCT and computational anatomy provide a powerful tool for mouse cardiac morphology analysis.
• This method overcomes limitations of small heart size for detailed cardiovascular research.
• The pipeline is effective for comparative studies of cardiac morphology in disease models.