ULTRASONIC STIFFNESS IMAGING OF RAT LIVER

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Project on live rats, on ultrasound system from BME. We plan to use our customized ultrasonic imaging system to image liver stiffness. For this initial study, we would like to obtain intial data answering the following questions: 1) can we image rat livers with our system, given the considerable cardiac and respiratory motion issues that exist. In people, we use ECG triggering and breath holds, but we need to demonstrate or assess the challenges we will encounter in a rat model prior to submitting our grant. In the grant we plan to propose longintudinal monitoring of liver stiffness with our ultrasound imaging system, and we want to correlate our stiffness images with histologic liver fibrosis stage, in a rat model for hepatic steatosis/progressive fibrosis that we have found is widely used in the liver (i.e. CCL4) The question we need to answer is: can we do this longitudinally in live animals on a ventilator, or are the motion problems too onerous, such that we will need to perform single time point studies.