Michael Jerosch-Herold1, Otavio Rizzi Coelho-Filho2, Richard Mitchell3, Heitor Moreno Junior4, Raymond Y. Kwong
1Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States; 2Medicine, Brigham & Women's Hospital; 3Harvard Medical School; 4State University of Campinas (UNICAMP)
To-date, no imaging technique has been validated to detect in-vivo cardiac cell hypertrophy, a common physiological response in the heart muscle to cardiac disease and pathological stress. We tested the hypothesis that determination of the rate of transcytolemmal water exchange, based on T1 measurements after fractionated gadolium contrast injections, could be used to detect cell-size changes in a mouse model of hypertensive heart disease. The intra-cellular lifetime of water correlated positively with direct morphological measurements of both minor and major cell diameters, and estimates of cell volume, assuming an oblong cylindrical shape.