Improved Method for Assessing Myocardial Infarction in Rodents at 9.4T using Delayed Enhancement-MRI

Introduction: MRI is becoming a widely used tool in cardiovascular research involving small animals, and is regarded as the gold standard for assessing many functional parameters, such as ejection fraction. However, the assessment of myocardial infarction by delayed enhancement (DE) using gadolinium contrast agents, has not seen as widespread use in small animal research, and studies have primarily used standard short TR T1weighted imaging sequences. In clinical cardiac MRI, inversion recovery sequences provide the optimum contrast between MI and healthy myocardium. Relatively few studies have reported on their use in small animals, due to the problems associated with rapid heart and respiratory rates and the relatively long T1 recovery times that are exhibited at high fields [1-3]. In this abstract we report on the implementation of an inversion recovery sequence on a 9.4T experimental system in order to assess myocardial infarction in rats 2 hours post MI.