A Vevo 3100 Small Animal Ultrasound Machine for the University of Cincinnati

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Project Title: A Vevo 3100 Small Animal Ultrasound Machine for the University of Cincinnati PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The current proposal requests funding for upgrading our VisualSonics Vevo 2100 small animal ultrasound machine to a Vevo 3100 system, to be housed and used in the University of Cincinnati Heart, Lung, and Vascular Institute. This system will support the NIH-funded research community at the University of Cincinnati spanning a broad range of investigators from the fields of cardiovascular research in the heart and aorta, lung and kidney diseases, and oncology. The extremely fast heart rate in mice necessitates the use of high frame rates and exceptionally high frequency transducers capable of rapid and high-resolution image acquisition, thus commercially available echocardiography systems for human clinical care and research cannot readily be adapted to provide the temporal and spatial resolution required for detailed assessment of cardiac anatomy and function in mice. At the time of purchase for our original machine (June 2010), the Vevo 2100 system represented the state-of-the-art technology in small animal echocardiography and ultrasound applications that were critical for our researchers to achieve in vivo measurements in their experimental applications and has resulted in more than 60 publications over the last 11 years. Importantly, acquisition of the Vevo 3100 system will markedly improve image quality via the reduction of speckle noise and artifacts allowing for more accurate and reproducible measurements, introduce 4D imaging providing more accurate functional cardiac measurements, and allow faster echocardiography (ECG)-gated kilohertz visualization or EKV, allowing for increased temporal and spatial resolution. Moreover, the Vevo 2100 has received an end-of-life notice from the VisualSonics Corporation and will no longer be maintained, serviced, or repaired as of December 2023. As such, the upgrade to the Vevo 3100 is requested to maintain the high level of in vivo analytics in animal studies at the University of Cincinnati, which are critical to dozens of investigators on the medical campus and open to the University’s other 150 NIH-funded investigators with upwards of 180 million dollars of NIH support annually. Our requested system will be operated by a Ph.D. scientist with 12 years’ experience in all aspects of small animal ultrasonography and this machine is fully supported by the University of Cincinnati to cover the cost of service contracts and technology development to help minimize the direct cost of services to the investigators. Together, proposed use of this instrument will support and enhance existing and future NIH-funded projects and lead to new directions of research for future projects.