MR Imaging for Mouse Phenotyping

R. Mark Henkelman¹

Comprehensive phenotyping of large numbers of mutant mice is laborious and expensive. Three-dimensional imaging is a promising approach for providing overviews of anatomical and functional phenotypes. This talk will describe some of the developments in high throughput imaging methods such as MR, X-ray CT, and optical imaging. Equally, or even more importantly, quantitative computer methods for analyzing differences in the 3D sets will be described. Example applications to a variety of mutants will be shown. Particular emphasis will be given to imaging of embryonic mutations given the expected large numbers of embryonic lethals from the single gene knockout programs.