Development of a semi-automated segmentation tool for high frequency ultrasound image analysis of mouse echocardiograms.

Echocardiography is a widely used and clinically translatable imaging modality for the evaluation of cardiac structure and function in preclinical drug discovery and development. Echocardiograms are among the first in vivo diagnostic tools utilized to evaluate the heart due to its relatively low cost, high throughput acquisition, and non-invasive nature; however lengthy manual image analysis, intra- and inter-operator variability, and subjective image analysis presents a challenge for reproducible data generation in preclinical research. To combat the image-processing bottleneck and address both variability and reproducibly challenges, we developed a semi-automated analysis algorithm workflow to analyze long- and short-axis murine left ventricle (LV) ultrasound images.