Abstract #1925

Draney M, Pelc N, Les A, Wilson N, Greve J, Taylor C

Manipulation of the murine genome to examine the contribution of genes to physiology and pathology has made understanding how to scale from mouse to human increasingly important. Phase contrast MRI (PCMRI) has been used clinically but rarely applied to small animal models. This work describes implementation, validation, and application of through-plane PCMRI to measure blood velocities in the aorta of rats and mice. Prospective gating had no effect on measurements and flow from a pulsatile phantom was accurately measured. Linear baseline corrections best rectified remaining static phase errors in vivo. Acquisition took 16 minutes per animal and was reproducible.