Animal Core Facilities and Resources

The DeBakey Heart Center Animal Surgery and Monitoring Laboratories consist of fully equipped surgical suites and laboratories for large and small animals totaling approximately 1,800 square feet enabling a variety of surgical maneuvers including coronary artery occlusion and reperfusion and aortic banding in mice as well as hemodynamic monitoring units for mice.

This core animal facility is operated in the Section of Cardiovascular Sciences of the Department of Medicine of Baylor College of Medicine and the DeBakey Heart Center. All animals are housed in facilities under the direction of the Center for Comparative Medicine comprised of a staff of 6 veterinarians, 5 veterinary technicians, and over 70 animal husbandry personnel.

Surgical tables, gas anesthesia machines and ventilators, complete monitoring equipment for Pulsed Doppler flow devices, Millar pressure transducers, and two INDUS Doppler signal processing workstations. The laboratories are equipped with the necessary dissecting instruments and surgical and dissection microscopes, coagulating apparatuses, data acquisition and software systems including personal computers with scanning and imaging capabilities, as well as data acquisition, storage and processing capabilities, digital storage oscilloscopes. A VisualSonics Vevo-770 echocardiogram Doppler system is also available.