Brittany Yerby1, Yun Jiang1, Farid Sari-Sarraf1, Jeffrey Tsao1
1Global Imaging Group, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Inc., Cambridge, MA, USA
A robust, high-throughput, in vivo readout of liver fat contents is important for preclinical obesity and diabetes research. Here, we demonstrate an approach that transforms hepatic fat fraction measurement into a semi-automated process that achieves a daily throughput of 35 animals, including acquisition and analysis, by judiciously combining macro-driven automation, IDEAL acquisition, retrospective motion compensation, hierarchical IDEAL reconstruction and rapid interactive Matlab-driven image analysis.