Arunark Kolipaka1, Shivani R. Aggarwal2, Kiaran P. McGee3, Nandan Anavekar4, Armando Manduca3, Richard Ehman3, Philip Araoz3
1Radiology, The Ohio State University Medical Center, Columbus, OH, United States; 2Medicine, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, United States; 3Radiology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, United States; 4Cardiovascular Diseases, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, United States
Contractility is the intrinsic ability of the heart to contract independent of preload and afterload. Recently, MR elastography (MRE) has been adapted to measure stiffness in the myocardium. The purpose of this study is to determine whether increasing left ventricular (LV) myocardial contractility by epinephrine infusion in an in vivo pig model is associated with increase in end-systolic (E-S) MRE-derived effective myocardial stiffness. MRE was performed on 5 pigs with incremental infusion of epinephrine to increase the heart rate by 20% from baseline. E-S MRE-derived effective myocardial stiffness increased linearly with increasing heart rate with epinephrine infusion.