Table 1. Animal assignments and comparisons of MR and histology for all sets of animals investigated.

Animal Set	Time After Infection	Mouse strain	In vivo Ex vivo		MR1	MR2	MR3
A	Chronic	SWR/J	in vivo	H1	0	0	0
	2–10 months			H2	0	0	0
Pre study				H3	0	0	3
Animals selected			ex vivo	H1	0	0	0
from larger group for				H2	0	0	0
strong T2* abnormalities				H3	0	0	2
B	Chronic	SWR/J	in vivo	H1	2c	0	0
	15 weeks			H2	2	1	0
				H3	0	0	1
C	Chronic	ABY	in vivo	H1	3c	0	0
	8 weeks			H2	1	1	0
				H3	0	0	3
			ex vivo	H1	2c	0	0
			subset from	H2	1	1	0
			in vivo	H3	0	0	3
D	Acute	ABY	in vivo	H1	0	0	0
	14 days			H2	2	3	0
				H3	0	0	3
E	Acute	ABY	ex vivo	H1	0	0	0
	14 days			H2	0	3	0
				H3	0	0	2
F	9 days	SWR/J	ex vivo	H1	2c	0	0
				H2	1	1	0
				H3	0	0	1
G *	9 days	ABY	ex vivo	H1	0	0	0
				H2	0	1	0
				H3	0	0	4
H	6 days	SWJ	ex vivo	H1	0	0	0
				H2	2	2	0
				H3	0	0	0
I	6 days	ABY	ex vivo	H1	0	0	0
F+G+H+I inoculated				H2	2	3	0
at same time				H3	0	0	1

* one animal was excluded. It was giving strong abnormal contrast ex vivo but not in histology. The analysis revealed a technical error in histological workup. The abbreviations MR1, MR2 and MR3 are used to designate the 3 defined MR groups: MR1 no myocarditis, MR2 mild myocarditis and MR3 severe myocarditis. The abbreviation H1, H2 and H3 are used to define the histological groups no myocarditis (H1, observed only in control animals), mild myocarditis (H2) and severe myocarditis (H3). We observed non-zero values only along the diagonals in the case of severe myocarditis, meaning that no mismatch between histology and MR diagnostic in animals with severe myocarditis was found. Note that some animals with a mild myocarditis are not detected by MRI (animals on off-diagonal) due to the higher sensitivity of histology which is capable of detecting myocyte damage at the single cell level compared to MRI. Those animals represent always cases with little numbers of very small lesions. Numbers followed by letter c indicate non-infected control mice.