Quantitative analysis of myocardial inflammation by flow cytometry in murine autoimmune myocarditis: correlation with cardiac function.

Inflammation has been increasingly recognized as an important pathological component of heart failure. Existing methods of assessing myocardial infiltrate are labor-intensive and provide data that are difficult to quantify and not representative of the whole heart. As a result, little effort has been made to systematically assess the components of myocardial inflammation.