Novel Acquisition and Computation of Cardiac Functions in Developing Zebrafish Embryos

Project Summary Despite extensive research and medical expenditures, cardiovascular disease continues to be the leading cause of mortality and morbidity in the modern world. Among animal models used in cardiovascular research, zebrafish (Dario rerio) has been proven to be the premier model for studies of developmental genetics and functional genomics owing to their conserved genome, small size, low-cost for maintenance, short generation time, and optical transparency, just to name a few. Further, zebrafish model enables a forward genetic approach to reveal the genetic basis and underlying molecular mechanisms of numerous heart diseases. Zebrafish cardiac physiology shows similar phenotypes to humans and the time-lapse videos of the heart development can be easily acquired. All these make zebrafish an ideal choice to investigate cardiac development, congenital heart disease as well as therapeutic potentials. The embryonic zebrafish (up to ~3 days) are transparent with decent internal organs visibility, including the heart and the vascular system. Thus, bright field microscopic videos can quantify cardiac mechanism and morphology at this stage. Conventionally, researchers have to label the ventricle manually, find the End Systolic (ES) and End Diastolic (ED) frames, and then derive the desired parameters, such as ejection fraction (EF) and heart rate (HR). This is tedious, time-consuming and inaccurate. In this context, we aim to develop a Zebrafish Automatic Cardiovascular Assessment System (ZACAS) with housing chambers, camera chipsets and electronics to give a fast, economic, hassle-free and easy solution for researchers to assess cardiac functions of developing zebrafish embryos. Specifically, we will i) Develop a novel apparatus to house and assess developing zebrafish embryos; and ii) Improve our existing framework to work with real-time videos and ECG taken from the apparatus. The developed system could be an invaluable asset for thousands of research laboratories worldwide as well as company working on drug screening.