MCL director Prof. C. -C. Jay Kuo is collaborating with CERL director Prof. Tzung Hsiai and CGC director Dr. Neil Chi to study how genetic programming is associated with congenital heart disease. They will study the heart development of the embryos of live zebrafish. The embryos of live zebrafish had Gata1a morpholino oligonucleotides (MO) micro-injection reduced erythropoiesis, which reduced viscosity by 70%. CERL research associate Dr. Peng Fei used single plane illumination microscopy (SPIM) technique to scan 1000 x-y frames in each plane from the top end of the zebrafish heart to the bottom end. MCL PhD student Hao Xu developed period determination, synchronization, and alignment algorithm to reconstruct 4-dimentional model (3-dimentional model over time) based on SPIM captured image sequences. CERL PhD candidate Juhyun Lee will use Amira to compute wall boundary conditions of the 4-dimentional model and introduce 3-dimentional Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate wall shear stress (WSS). The initial results have been published in BMES [1].

MCL is glad that its advanced image processing algorithm development capacity can be used to assist cardiovascular research. MCL will continue provide useful image processing tools that works in various areas of research.

[1]. Juhyun Lee, Peng Fei, Hao Xu, Chih-ming Ho, C.-C. Jay Kuo, Neil Chi and Tzung Hsiai, “Linking between cardiac trabeculation development and wall shear stress with 4-dimenstional single plane illumination microscopy,” Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) annual meeting, San Antonio, Texas, USA, October 22-25, 2014.