Researchers from Imperial College London’s Department of Bioengineering and Faculty of Medicine worked alongside academics from UCL to produce sub-millimetre resolution images of cardiac micro-vessels. The non-invasive new imaging technique was tested on four human patients.
Existing imaging technologies can visualise large vessels on the heart’s surface. However, this new technique could allow scientists to study the physiology of the heart in more detail by imaging smaller micro-vessels within the heart muscle.
This research, published today in Nature Biomedical Engineering, could help clinicians better understand the role such vessels play in cardiovascular diseases such as microvascular coronary disease and cardiomyopathies, as well as undiagnosed chest pains.