Automated ischemic lesion detection in a neonatal model of hypoxic ischemic injury.

Purpose: To develop and compare an automated detection system for ischemic lesions in a neonatal model of bilateral carotid artery occlusion with hypoxia (BCAO-H) from T2 weighted MRI (T2WI) to the currently used "gold standard" of manual segmentation.

Materials And Methods: Forty-three P10 BCAO-H rat pups and 8 controls underwent T2WI at 1 day and 28 days. A computational imaging method, Hierarchical Region Splitting (HRS), was developed to automatically and rapidly detect and quantify 3D lesion and normal appearing brain matter (NABM) volumes.

Brain water mobility decreases after astrocytic aquaporin-4 inhibition using RNA interference.

Neuroimaging with diffusion-weighted imaging is routinely used for clinical diagnosis/prognosis. Its quantitative parameter, the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC), is thought to reflect water mobility in brain tissues. After injury, reduced ADC values are thought to be secondary to decreases in the extracellular space caused by cell swelling.

Rodent neonatal bilateral carotid artery occlusion with hypoxia mimics human hypoxic-ischemic injury.

We report a new clinically relevant model of neonatal hypoxic-ischemic injury in a 10-day-old rat pup. Bilateral carotid artery occlusion and 8% hypoxia (1 to 15 mins, BCAO-H) was induced with varying degrees of injury (mild, moderate, severe), which was quantified using magnetic resonance imaging including diffusion-weighted and T2-weighted imaging at 24 h and 21/28 days. We developed a magnetic resonance imaging-based rat pup severity score and compared 3D ischemic injury volumes/rat pup severity score with histology and behavioral testing.