Ventricular myocardium development and the role of connexins in the human fetal heart.

ABSTRACT: The developmental timeline of the human heart remains elusive. The heart takes on its characteristic four chambered appearance by ~56 days gestational age (DGA). However, owing to the complexities (both technical and logistical) of exploring development in utero, we understand little of how the ventricular walls develop. To address this, we employed diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging to explore the architecture and tissue organization of the developing heart aged 95-143 DGA. We show that fractional anisotropy increases (from ~0.1 to ~0.5), diffusion coefficients decrease (from ~1 × 10^-3mm²/sec to ~0.4 × 10^-3mm²/sec), and fiber paths, extracted by tractography, increase linearly with gestation, indicative of the increasing organization of

SUBMITTER: Pervolaraki E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5612926 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature