Development of Optical Coherence Tomography for Quantitative Analysis of Cardiac Morphology

Transgenic mouse models have been instrumental in the elucidation of the molecular mechanism behind many cardiac diseases such as Marfan syndrome. However, the small size of the murine heart has hampered the characterization of its cardiac morphology. In this project, we describe the development of a murine cardiac imaging modality using optical coherence tomography (OCT). After fixation and optical clearing, the hearts were imaged from multiple perspectives. These data sets were then corrected for refraction and registered together to yield a single volume of the whole heart. From this OCT volume, we then applied techniques from computational anatomy to quantify morphological parameters such as wall thickness, luminal volume, and wall masses. Using this pipeline, we performed a preliminary study comparing the cardiac morphology of a mice model of Marfan syndrome with their wild-type counterparts.