Instituto de Engenharia Biomédica (INEB), Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal.
PLoS One. 2011;6(9):e25045. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025045. Epub 2011 Sep 30.
The cardiac regenerative potential of newly developed therapies is traditionally evaluated in rodent models of surgically induced myocardial ischemia. A generally accepted key parameter for determining the success of the applied therapy is the infarct size. Although regarded as a gold standard method for infarct size estimation in heart ischemia, histological planimetry is time-consuming and highly variable amongst studies. The purpose of this work is to contribute towards the standardization and simplification of infarct size assessment by providing free access to a novel semi-automated software tool. The acronym MIQuant was attributed to this application.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Mice were subject to permanent coronary artery ligation and the size of chronic infarcts was estimated by area and midline-length methods using manual planimetry and with MIQuant. Repeatability and reproducibility of MIQuant scores were verified. The validation showed high correlation (r(midline length) = 0.981; r(area) = 0.970 ) and agreement (Bland-Altman analysis), free from bias for midline length and negligible bias of 1.21% to 3.72% for area quantification. Further analysis demonstrated that MIQuant reduced by 4.5-fold the time spent on the analysis and, importantly, MIQuant effectiveness is independent of user proficiency. The results indicate that MIQuant can be regarded as a better alternative to manual measurement.
We conclude that MIQuant is a reliable and an easy-to-use software for infarct size quantification. The widespread use of MIQuant will contribute towards the standardization of infarct size assessment across studies and, therefore, to the systematization of the evaluation of cardiac regenerative potential of emerging therapies.
新开发疗法的心脏再生潜力传统上在手术诱导心肌缺血的啮齿动物模型中进行评估。用于确定应用疗法成功的一个普遍接受的关键参数是梗塞面积。尽管组织学平面测量法被认为是心肌缺血中梗塞面积估计的金标准方法，但在研究中它耗时且高度可变。本工作的目的是通过提供一种新的半自动软件工具来促进梗塞面积评估的标准化和简化。这个应用程序被命名为 MIQuant。
方法/主要发现：将小鼠置于永久性冠状动脉结扎下，使用手动平面测量法和 MIQuant 通过面积和中线长度方法来估计慢性梗塞的大小。验证了 MIQuant 评分的可重复性和再现性。验证表明，MIQuant 评分具有高度相关性（中线长度 r(midline length)=0.981；面积 r(area)=0.970）和一致性（Bland-Altman 分析），没有中线长度的偏差，面积定量的偏差可忽略不计，为 1.21%至 3.72%。进一步分析表明，MIQuant 将分析时间减少了 4.5 倍，重要的是，MIQuant 的有效性与用户的熟练程度无关。结果表明，MIQuant 可以作为手动测量的更好替代方法。
我们得出结论，MIQuant 是一种可靠且易于使用的梗塞面积定量软件。MIQuant 的广泛应用将有助于跨研究标准化梗塞面积评估，从而促进新兴疗法的心脏再生潜力的系统评估。
