Johannes Riegler1,2, Anthony Niel Price1, Kenneth King Cheung1, Jon Orlando Cleary1, Mark Francies Lythgoe1
1Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging (CABI), Department of Medicine and Institute of Child Health, University College London (UCL), London, UK; 2Centre for Mathematics and Physics in the Life Sciences and Experimental Biology (CoMPLEX), UCL, London, UK
Cardiac MRI is used for the assessment of animal models of heart failure. Manual image processing is frequently used to determine cardiac function. Since this is time consuming two different clinical cardiac analysis tools were compared against manual segmentation to establish the intra-observer variability and preclinical applicability for rats pre- and post-myocardial infarction (MI). Semi-automated methods offered faster analysis time, and showed similar intra-observer variability and acceptable limits of agreement compared to a manual method for rodent CMR. However, a different bias was found for the estimation of the ejection fraction for pre- and post-MI data.