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(Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. 2007;27:1666.)
© 2007 American Heart Association, Inc.

Letters to the Editor

Animal Models and Virtual Histology

Renu Virmani; Gaku Nakazawa

From CVPath Institute Inc, Gaithersburg, Md.

Correspondence to Renu Virmani, CVPath Institute Inc, 19 Firstfield Rd, Gaithersburg, MD 20878. E-mail rvirmani@cvpath.org

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

In Response:

We read with much interest in the February issue of Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology an article by Granada et al¹ entitled "In vivo Plaque Characterization Using Intravascular Ultrasound Virtual Histology in a Porcine Model of Complex Coronary Lesions." The results of this study showed that the Virtual Histology (intravascular ultrasound (IVUS)-VH) was not accurate in detecting the relative amount of specific plaque components in an animal model. The findings from this study are no surprise to us, as the algorithm was created from human coronary arteries; the authors failed to mention that IVUS virtual histology was not created to detect pig arterial changes that have been produced in 10 weeks of high cholesterol feeding and injection of oxidized LDL delivered by microsyringe infusion catheter. Although the authors claim that they performed frozen sections, the illustrations provided are paraffin-embedded samples and not one section of the oil red O-stained artery is provided to convince the reader that actually lipid deposition was detected in a credible manner or the lesions in any way resemble human atherosclerotic disease. Also the lesion illustrated with "myeloperoxidase stain" is actually negative. We believe that the model is not one of atherosclerosis but is rich in smooth muscle cells and proteoglycans and therefore more indicative of a restenosis model. The authors claim that fibrous tissue was 40.3±12.8% and fibrolipidic was 16.8±8.19% (not clear how this was determined), and it is unclear how the fibrous tissue was determined and by what stain. The authors do . . . [Full Text of this Article]