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(Circulation. 2003;108:e154.)
© 2003 American Heart Association, Inc.

Images in Cardiovascular Medicine

Approaching Cardiac Development in Three Dimensions by Magnetic Resonance Microscopy

T. Mesud Yelbuz, MD, PhD^*; Xiaowei Zhang, MS, MD^*; Michael A. Choma, BS; Harriett A. Stadt, HTL; Marzena Zdanowicz, DVM; G. Allan Johnson, PhD; Margaret L. Kirby, PhD

From the Neonatal Perinatal Research Institute, Division of Neonatology (T.M.Y., H.A.S., M.Z., M.L.K.), and Center for In Vivo Microscopy (X.Z., G.A.J.), Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC; Department of Biomedical Engineering (M.A.C.), Duke University, Durham, NC; and Department of Pediatric Cardiology and Intensive Care Medicine (T.M.Y.), Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany.

Correspondence to Dr Talât Mesud Yelbuz, Children’s Hospital, Medical School Hannover, Department of Pediatrics III (Pediatric Cardiology and Intensive Care Medicine), Carl Neuberg Strasse 1, 30623 Hannover, Germany. E-mail yelbuz.mezud@mh-hannover.de

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

Cardiac neural crest (CNC) ablation in embryonic chicks leads to conotruncal anomalies of the heart as a result of altered cardiac looping. Altered looping results from failure of the myocardium from the secondary heart field to be added to the outflow tract. Various imaging techniques have been applied to visualize embryonic heart development. However, morphological abnormalities frequently cannot clearly be identified or appreciated in 2 dimensions, particularly those involving misorientation of cardiovascular structures and changes of myocardial volume. We present here 3-dimensional (3D) reconstructions of the embryonic chick heart at looping stages in sham-operated and CNC-ablated embryos acquired by magnetic resonance microscopy (MRM) using a new dual-contrast method for specimen preparation that combines perfusion fixation and immersion in fixative with a macro-molecular gadolinium-based contrast agent. In contrast to previous techniques, this method provides imaging not only of the cardiac chambers and vessel lumens but also of internal and external cardiac structures, such as the ventricular wall, myocardial trabeculations, cardiac jelly, and endocardial cushions. Furthermore, it allows morphovolumetric analysis of hearts at different stages. There is an excellent correlation between images obtained from MRM and those obtained by routine histology (Figure 1). 3D MRM can represent anatomic information ranging from sectional images along arbitrary anatomic planes to volumetric reconstructions of the heart (Figure 2 and Movies I through IV). A great advantage of 3D reconstructions is that rotation of the image around any axis is possible without the limitations associated with interpretation based on a single plane, as . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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