Related Experiment Video
Updated: Dec 23, 2025
A Pipeline to Characterize Structural Heart Defects in the Fetal Mouse
Published on: December 16, 2022
CACCT: An Automated Tool of Detecting Complicated Cardiac Malformations in Mouse Models
Qing Chu1, Haobin Jiang1, Libo Zhang2
1State Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Disease Fuwai Hospital National Center for Cardiovascular Disease Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College Beijing 100037 China.
Insights
A new automated tool, computer-assisted cardiac cavity tracking (CACCT), precisely identifies complex congenital heart disease (CHD) malformations in mouse models. This innovation aids researchers in understanding CHD pathogenesis and heart development mechanisms.
Area of Science:
- Cardiology
- Developmental Biology
- Medical Imaging
Background:
- Congenital heart disease (CHD) is a leading cause of infant and childhood mortality.
- Understanding CHD pathogenesis requires effective mouse models.
- Current 2D phenotyping methods struggle to accurately characterize complex 3D cardiac malformations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce an automated tool for analyzing 3D cardiac malformations in mouse models.
- To enable accurate and convenient identification of complex CHD in research settings.
- To facilitate mechanistic studies of CHD and heart development.
Main Methods:
- Development of computer-assisted cardiac cavity tracking (CACCT) software.
- Utilizing microcomputed tomography (micro-CT) imaging data.
- Automated detection of cardiac cavity connections and malformations.
Main Results:
- CACCT automatically detects and identifies complex cardiac malformations in mouse hearts.
- The tool accurately diagnoses conditions like transposition of the great arteries and ventricular septal defects.
- Accuracy is comparable to that of experienced fetal cardiologists.
Conclusions:
- CACCT offers an effective approach for precise identification of heterogeneous cardiac malformations.
- This tool empowers researchers, regardless of CHD diagnostic expertise, to study heart development.
- CACCT will accelerate mechanistic research into congenital heart disease.
Abstract:
Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the major cause of morbidity/mortality in infancy and childhood. Using a mouse model to uncover the mechanism of CHD is essential to understand its pathogenesis. However, conventional 2D phenotyping methods cannot comprehensively exhibit and accurately distinguish various 3D cardiac malformations for the complicated structure of heart cavity. Here, a new automated tool based on microcomputed tomography (micro-CT) image data sets known as computer-assisted cardiac cavity tracking (CACCT) is presented, which can detect the connections between cardiac cavities and identify complicated cardiac malformations in mouse hearts automatically. With CACCT, researchers, even those without expert training or diagnostic experience of CHD, can identify complicated cardiac malformations in mice conveniently and precisely, including transposition of the great arteries, double-outlet right ventricle and atypical ventricular septal defect, whose accuracy is equivalent to senior fetal cardiologists. CACCT provides an effective approach to accurately identify heterogeneous cardiac malformations, which will facilitate the mechanistic studies into CHD and heart development.
