Figure 2

Assessment of mid-ventricular short-axis views of a mouse heart in different cardiac phases. (A) Exemplary self-gated cine FLASH and UTE images in the end-diastolic, ejection, end-systolic and inflow phase of a cardiac cycle. Flow and susceptibility artifacts were more pronounced in self-gated FLASH images than in UTE images and are highlighted by yellow arrows. (B) Results of the qualitative assessment of both self-gated UTE and FLASH images in the end-diastolic and inflow phase, performed by two independent readers (R1 and R2) using a 5-level scale (1 = best, 5 = worst). The image quality was assessed with respect to flow artifacts (Q1), their boundary between the ventricular blood and the myocardium including the papillary muscles (Q2), susceptibility artifacts at the myocardium-lung interface (Q3), their interference with the depiction of the RV myocardium (Q4), acquisition artifacts (Q5) and the overall suitability for segmentation of the LV cavity and the myocardium using Segment and Amira software (Q6). Results were averaged over images of six healthy C57BL/6 mice. (C) Self-gated UTE images in the cardiac inflow phase acquired with echo times of 0.314 ms, 0.6 ms, 1 ms, 2 ms, 3 ms.