Abbas Shirinifard and his team have described a method for estimating absolute blood perfusion in tissues. They used kidneys in anesthetized mice as their reference organ to estimate blood perfusion in tumor. Studies of blood flow in mice and dogs have indicated that the fraction of cardiac output delivered to kidneys does not change under anesthesia compared with consciousness. They assumed that tumor blood perfusion is not actively regulated under anesthesia, and the fraction of the cardiac output delivered to the tumor remains the same. Thus, the tumor blood perfusion estimates are good approximations of tumor blood perfusion in conscious animals. This assumption does not hold for tissues like muscle, spleen and liver, where the fraction of the cardiac output delivered changes under anesthesia.
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