Guidelines for assessing ventricular pressure-volume relationships in rodents

Ventricular catheterization with a pressure-volume (PV) catheter is the gold-standard method for assessing in vivo cardiac function in animal studies, providing valuable ‘load-independent’ indices of systolic and diastolic heart performance. PV studies are commonly performed to elucidate mechanistic insights into cardiovascular disease using surgical and genetically engineered rat and mouse models, but there is considerable heterogeneity in how these studies are performed. Wide variation in protocol design, volume calibration, anesthesia, manipulation of cardiac loading conditions and how load-independent indices of cardiac function are derived, as well as in data analysis and reporting, is constraining reliability and reproducibility in the field. The purpose of this manuscript is to combine our collective expertise in performing open- and closed-chest left and right ventricle PV studies in rodents to provide consensus guidelines on how to perform, analyze and interpret these studies using either conductance or admittance PV catheters. We first review recent methodological reporting in rodent PV studies in this journal, and discuss important details required to improve reproducibility within and across PV studies. We then recommend steps to obtain high-quality PV data, from volume calibration to choice of anesthetic agent and acquiring load-independent indices of both systolic and diastolic function. We also consider between- and within-animal variation and recommend how to perform data analysis and visualization. We hope that this consensus paper guides those performing PV studies in rodents and helps align the field with best practices in surgical/analytical methodologies and reporting, facilitating better reliability and reproducibility in the PV field.