Look, I don’t know who I even need to say this to, but as much as you might like to think it does, a heart doesn’t look anything like the ones we’d scribble onto our mate’s planners at school.
Obviously not. But still, it’s not exactly often that we get to have a deep, good old look at a real human heart.
And now, the first ever ‘Google Earth’ organ video shows us the insides of healthy and diseased hearts in extraordinary detail.
Experts at University College London (UCL) and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) used a new X-ray technique to capture the anatomical structure of them right down to a teeny-tiny 20 micrometres.
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So, while you might spend your free time stalking random streets on Google Earth – hey, no judgement – that’s pretty much the detail you can explore a heart to with this.
The video compares two whole hearts from two adult donors. And while you can clearly see a defined shape of the healthy heart, the diseased one appears rounder with more withered vessels and muscle fibres.
“The atlas that we’ve created in this study is like having Google Earth for the human heart,” explained Professor Peter Lee, senior author of the study from UCL Mechanical Engineering.
“It allows us to view the whole organ at global scale, then zoom in to street level to look at cardiovascular features in unprecedented detail.”
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At France’s ESRF, the team used the X-ray technique hierarchical phase-contrast tomography (HiP-CT) to image the hearts down to this minuscule scale.
“One of the major advantages of this technique is that it achieves a full 3D view of the organ that’s around 25 times better than a clinical CT scanner,” Lee added.
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“In addition, it can zoom in to cellular level in selected areas, which is 250 times better, to achieve the same detail as we would through a microscope but without cutting the sample.
“Being able to image whole organs like this reveals details and connections that were previously unknown.”
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The reason the researches used hearts from deceased donors is simply because it just wouldn’t be possible to image a living heart in this way as the radiation dose would be far too high for it to be safe.
Experts hope these new images will help with increasing the understanding of cardiovascular disease.
“We now have a way to determine differences in the thickness of tissue and fat layers located between the outer surface of the heart and the protective sac surrounding the heart, which could be relevant when treating arrhythmia,” said Professor Andrew Cook, heart anatomist from the UCL's cardiovascular science institute.
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The study was published yesterday on Radiology.
Topics: Health, Science, Technology
Jess Battison