Regensburg 2019 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 12: Poster II

BP 12.16: Poster

Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 14:00–16:00, Poster B2

Myofiber orientation in a whole mouse heart — •Marius Reichardt and Tim Salditt — Institut für Röntgenphysik, Göttingen, Deutschland

Heart contractility is one of the most important physiological functions and relies on an intricate, hierarchical molecular- and cytoarchitecture. With recent advances in high-resolution imaging techniques, most notably computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the cardiac cytoarchitecture and muscle fiber arrangement can now be resolved in three-dimensions with micrometer resolution. The resolution offered by such conventional means, i.e. ultrasound, diffusion-tensor MRI or clinical CT, is however still not sufficient to resolve the full fiber network down to the level of a single muscle fiber. We performed experiments on an entire mouse heart at a liquid-metal jet µCT laboratory setup with an effective pixel size of 5.5x5.5 µm². Based on the reconstructed 3D electron density the fiber orientation, degree of filament alignment and thickness of single muscle bundles in the whole heart could be determined by applying an algorithm based on the 3D Fourier transform of sub-volumes of the reconstruction. The results will be very useful for structural and dynamical models of cardiac tissue as electromechanical finite element models in order to increase the precision and the way they represent the geometry of the heart. This information may also be used in the future to differentiate healthy and pathological heart tissue in clinical computed tomography as we could already show for neuronal tissue.