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.

Zacchigna, Serena Paldino, Alessia Falcão-Pires, Inês Daskalopoulos, Evangelos-Panagiotis [UCL] Dal Ferro, Matteo Vodret, Simone Lesizza, Pierluigi Cannatà, Antonio Miranda-Silva, Daniela Lourenço, André P Pinamonti, Bruno Sinagra, Gianfranco Weinberger, Florian Eschenhagen, Thomas Carrier, Lucie Kehat, Izhak Tocchetti, Carlo G Russo, Michele Ghigo, Alessandra Cimino, James Hirsch, Emilio Dawson, Dana Ciccarelli, Michele Oliveti, Marco Linke, Wolfgang A Cuijpers, Ilona Heymans, Stephane Hamdani, Nazha de Boer, Martine Duncker, Dirk Kuster, Diederik van der Velden, Jolanda Beauloye, Christophe [UCL] Bertrand, Luc [UCL] Mayr, Manuel Giacca, Mauro Leuschner, Florian Backs, Johannes Thum, Thomas Working Group on Myocardial Function of the European Society of Cardiology. et al.[show all]

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.