Assessment of Cardiac Function Using High Frequency Ultrasound

When I first started working at Visual Sonics back in 2006 my favorite organ was the lungs, and I had really never learned much about the heart or the vascular system. I remember knowing that the heart had four chambers, but the direction that the blood flowed was something that wasn't even on my radar.

Over the years of working at Visual Sonics, Aspect Imaging, and most recently at Scintica Instrumentation, I have had the pleasure of working with so many researchers from all over the world that study the cardiovascular system, and it's associated biological pathways and disease mechanisms in a variety of different species. From zebrafish, frogs, and salamanders, to mice, rats, and rabbits of course, but even bats and birds. With ultrasound being the gold standard in real-time cardiac imaging in the clinic, we have seen the same in the preclinical space as well. For those fortunate enough to have access to an MRI system, the resulting images provide exquisite detail that at times may be missed, or more challenging to interpret with ultrasound; however the acquisition time, and with some systems, the complexity of acquiring those images has not allowed for wide spread adoption of the technique.

In this publicly available video, done at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I preform a complete assessment of both systolic and diastolic function in a mouse using the Prospect T1 high-frequency ultrasound system.