Towards standardization of echocardiography for the evaluation of left ventricular function in adult rodents : a position paper of the ESC Working Group on Myocardial Function

This work was supported by AIRC IG grant 2016 19032 to S.Z.; FEDER through Compete 2020 –Programa Operacional Competitividade E Internacionalização(POCI), the project DOCNET (norte-01-0145-feder-000003), supported by Norte Portugal regional operational programme (norte 2020), under the Portugal 2020 partnership agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the project NETDIAMOND (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016385), supported by European Structural And Investment Funds, Lisbon’s regional operational program 2020 to I.P.F.; grants from FSR-FNRS, FRC (Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc) and from Action de Recherche Concertée (UCLouvain) to C.B., E.P.D. and L.B; the ERA-Net-CVD project MacroERA,01KL1706, FP7-Homage N° 305507, and IMI2-CARDIATEAM (N° 821508)to S.H.,the DZHK (German Centre for Cardiovascular Research) and the German Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF)to F.W., T.E. and L.C., the Netherlands Cardiovascular Research Initiative, an initiative with support of the Dutch Heart Foundation, CVON2016-Early HFPEF, 2015-10, CVON She-PREDICTS, grant 2017-21, CVON Arena-PRIME, 2017-18, Flemish Research FoundationFWO G091018N and FWO G0B5930N to S.H.; Federico II University/Ricerca di Ateneo grant to C.G..T.; the European Research Area Networks on Cardiovascular Diseases (ERA-CVD) [LYMIT-DIS 2016, MacroERA], Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [1160718N] to I.C; the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG TH903/20-1, KFO311), the Transregio-SFB INST 95/15641 and the EU Horizon 2020 project Cardioregenix (GA 825670)to T.TPeer reviewedPostprin

Toward standardization of echocardiography for the evaluation of left ventricular function in adult rodents: a position paper of the ESC Working Group on Myocardial Function.

Echocardiography is a reliable and reproducible method to assess non-invasively cardiac function in clinical and experimental research. Significant progress in the development of echocardiographic equipment and transducers has led to the successful translation of this methodology from humans to rodents, allowing for the scoring of disease severity and progression, testing of new drugs, and monitoring cardiac function in genetically modified or pharmacologically treated animals. However, as yet, there is no standardization in the procedure to acquire echocardiographic measurements in small animals. This position paper focuses on the appropriate acquisition and analysis of echocardiographic parameters in adult mice and rats, and provides reference values, representative images and videos for the accurate and reproducible quantification of left ventricular function in healthy and pathological conditions.status: Published onlin