Key result
A novel correlative imaging workflow successfully quantified the geometric parameters and circumferential collagen fiber alignment of the murine pulmonary valve under varying transvalvular pressures.
Why the study?
Studies on heart valve disease using murine models have been hindered by a lack of appropriate methodologies due to their small scale.
This study establishes a multi-scale, imaging-based methodology to quantify the functional structure and geometry of the murine pulmonary valve, providing a foundation for future organ-level murine models of heart valve disease.
Provides foundation for murine valve models; leaves open human translation pending validation.
Murine animal models are an established standard in translational research and provides a potential platform for studying heart valve disease. To date, studies on heart valve disease using murine models have been hindered by a lack of appropriate methodologies due to their small scale. In the present study, we developed a multi-scale, imaging-based approach to extract the functional structure and geometry for the murine heart valve. We chose the pulmonary valve (PV) to study, due to its importance in congenital heart valve disease. Excised pulmonary outflow tracts from eleven 1-year old C57BL/6J mice were fixed at 10, 20, and 30 mmHg to simulate physiological loading. Micro-computed tomography was used to reconstruct the 3D organ-level PV geometry, which was then spatially correlated with serial en-face scanning electron microscopy imaging to quantify local collagen fiber distributions. From the acquired volume renderings, we obtained the geometric descriptors of the murine PV under increasing transvalvular pressures, which demonstrated remarkable consistency. We also observed that the preferred collagen orientation was predominantly in the circumferential direction, as in larger mammalian valves. The present study represents a first step in establishing organ-level murine models for the study of heart valve disease.
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Liu et al. (2021) studied Normal murine pulmonary heart valve (n=11). Transvalvular hydrostatic pressure (10, 20, and 30 mmHg) was evaluated on Geometric descriptors and collagen fiber distributions of the murine pulmonary valve. A novel correlative imaging workflow successfully quantified the geometric parameters and circumferential collagen fiber alignment of the murine pulmonary valve under varying transvalvular pressures.
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