Dominik Maria Reisinger1,
2, Jiangyang Zhang3, Joel Marx1, Michael Porambo1,
Michael V. Johnston1, Seyed Ali Fatemi1, 2
1Neuroscience,
Hugo W. Moser Research Institute at Kennedy Krieger, Baltimore, MD, United
States; 2Neurology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,
Baltimore, MD, United States; 3Radiology, Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States
Despite the preventable nature of bilirubin encephalopathy, classically known as Kernicterus, cases continue to occur and remain a significant problem in newborns. A mutant rat model, referred to as the Gunn rat, features an enzyme deficiency resembling Crigler-Najjar syndrome of the human. Sulfadimethoxine will be used to exaggerate bilirubin encephalopathy. This way we tried to resemble Kernicterus in the newborn and further evaluated the model through acquiring high-resolution images of T2-weighted sequences as well as in vivo diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of the Gunn rat.