Figure 5.

Mid-ventricular short-axis cine MR images acquired throughout the cardiac cycle in a rat on a 3T MR scanner. The blood pool appears bright and the myocardial tissue dark. The end diastolic and end systolic frames are labeled. Ventricular volumes and mass can be computed from these images by summing the volumes from all the slices spanning the left ventricle. The imaging parameters include: 7.5 ms repetition time; 2.8 ms echo time; and a 20° flip angle. A 90 mm field of view, 400 × 400 imaging matrix, and 2 mm slice thickness was used yielding a spatial resolution of 0.23 × 0.23 × 2 mm³.