Lipid and smooth muscle architectural pathology in the rabbit atherosclerotic vessel wall using Q-space cardiovascular magnetic resonance

Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance

Research

Van J. Wedeen¹  Farzad Mortazavi²  Sunni Lin³  Jamila H. Siamwala⁴  Nasi Huang⁵  James A. Hamilton⁶  Erik N. Taylor⁷  Richard J. Gilbert⁸ 

[1] AA Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA;Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA;Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA;Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology, and Biotechnology, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Providence, RI, USA;Department of Physiology & Biophysics, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA;Department of Physiology & Biophysics, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA;Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA;Department of Physiology & Biophysics, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA;Department of Radiology, UNM School of Medicine, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA;Research Service, Providence VA Medical Center and Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Providence, RI, USA;

关键词: Diffusion-weighted Q-space MRI;    Atherosclerosis;    Cardiovascular disease;    Inflammation;    Cholesterol;    Thrombosis;    Smooth muscle architecture;    Lipids;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12968-022-00897-7

 received in 2022-03-17, accepted in 2022-10-19,  发布年份 2022

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundAtherosclerosis is an arterial vessel wall disease characterized by slow, progressive lipid accumulation, smooth muscle disorganization, and inflammatory infiltration. Atherosclerosis often remains subclinical until extensive inflammatory injury promotes vulnerability of the atherosclerotic plaque to rupture with luminal thrombosis, which can cause the acute event of myocardial infarction or stroke. Current bioimaging techniques are unable to capture the pathognomonic distribution of cellular elements of the plaque and thus cannot accurately define its structural disorganization.MethodsWe applied cardiovascular magnetic resonance spectroscopy (CMRS) and diffusion weighted CMR (DWI) with generalized Q-space imaging (GQI) analysis to architecturally define features of atheroma and correlated these to the microscopic distribution of vascular smooth muscle cells (SMC), immune cells, extracellular matrix (ECM) fibers, thrombus, and cholesteryl esters (CE). We compared rabbits with normal chow diet and cholesterol-fed rabbits with endothelial balloon injury, which accelerates atherosclerosis and produces advanced rupture-prone plaques, in a well-validated rabbit model of human atherosclerosis.ResultsOur methods revealed new structural properties of advanced atherosclerosis incorporating SMC and lipid distributions. GQI with tractography portrayed the locations of these components across the atherosclerotic vessel wall and differentiated multi-level organization of normal, pro-inflammatory cellular phenotypes, or thrombus. Moreover, the locations of CE were differentiated from cellular constituents by their higher restrictive diffusion properties, which permitted chemical confirmation of CE by high field voxel-guided CMRS.ConclusionsGQI with tractography is a new method for atherosclerosis imaging that defines a pathological architectural signature for the atheromatous plaque composed of distributed SMC, ECM, inflammatory cells, and thrombus and lipid. This provides a detailed transmural map of normal and inflamed vessel walls in the setting of atherosclerosis that has not been previously achieved using traditional CMR techniques. Although this is an ex-vivo study, detection of micro and mesoscale level vascular destabilization as enabled by GQI with tractography could increase the accuracy of diagnosis and assessment of treatment outcomes in individuals with atherosclerosis.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s) 2022

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