Experts in Britain and France used a new X-ray technique to capture anatomical structures up to 20 micrometres away, half the width of a human hair.
In certain areas of the heart, imaging was performed at the cellular level.
The amazing technology allows viewers to look at a healthy and diseased heart in “unprecedented detail.”
Experts hope this “invaluable” technology will be able to help them better understand cardiovascular diseases and “accelerate” medicine in this field.
The video provides a 3D look inside two adult human hearts. While a healthy heart has a clearly defined shape, a diseased heart is round, with shrivelled vessels and muscle fibers.
These images were obtained by experts at University College London (UCL) and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France.
“The atlas we’ve created in this study is like having a Google Earth for the human heart,” said Professor Peter Lee, from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University College London. “It allows us to view the entire organ on a global scale, and then zoom in to street level to look at cardiovascular features in unprecedented detail.”
It is noteworthy that the two hearts were taken from deceased donors, and the healthy heart was from a 63-year-old white donor with no known heart problems.
The diseased heart came from an 87-year-old white donor with a history of ischemic heart disease, which occurs when the heart weakens due to reduced blood flow.
Ischemic heart disease was responsible for 8.9 million or 16% of deaths worldwide in 2019, a figure that has risen by more than 2 million since 2001.
The woman also had high blood pressure and atrial fibrillation (an irregular, often very fast heart rhythm).
At the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France, the team used an X-ray technique called pyramid-intensity contrast computed tomography (HiP-CT) to image hearts down to 20 micrometers.
“One of the key advantages of this technology is that it achieves a full 3D view of the organ that is regarding 25 times better than a clinical CT scanner,” said Professor Lee. “In addition, it can zoom in at the cellular level in specific areas, 250 times better, to achieve the same detail as we do with a microscope but without cutting the specimen. Being able to image entire organs like this reveals details and connections that were previously unknown.”
Experts pointed out that these hearts were taken from deceased donors for a good reason, which is that it would not be possible to image the heart of a living person in this way because the radiation dose would be too high.
However, it may be some time before this technology is used routinely, as imaging each heart generates 10 terabytes of data, a million times more than a standard CT scan.
“The main limiting factor is the processing of the very large data that HiP-CT produces,” said Paul Tavoro of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), which invented the technique.
“We now have a way to identify differences in the thickness of tissue and fat layers between the outer surface of the heart and the protective sac surrounding the heart, which might be relevant when treating arrhythmias,” said Professor Andrew Cook, a cardiac anatomist from the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences at University College London.
Source: Daily Mail
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2024-07-18 12:57:54
