Incredible video takes a visit contained in the human coronary heart

Incredible video takes a trip inside human hearts – showing the organ in greater detail than ever before. 

Experts in Britain and France used a new X-ray technique to capture the anatomical structure down to 20 micrometres – half the width of a human hair. 

In certain areas, imaging has been done to cellular level – meaning individual cells of the organ are being shown.  

The clip compares two whole hearts from deceased adult donors – one healthy and one diseased. 

And while the healthy heart is a clearly defined shape, the poorly heart is rounder, with withered vessels and muscle fibres.  

The imagery has been achieved by experts at University College London (UCL) and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France. 

‘The atlas that we’ve created in this study is like having Google Earth for the human heart,’ said Professor Peter Lee at UCL’s department of 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.’ 

The hearts are from two deceased patients; the healthy one was from a 63-year-old white male donor without any known heart problems.

Meanwhile, the diseased heart was from an 87-year-old white female donor with a history of ischaemic heart disease, which is when the heart is weakened due to receiving reduced blood flow. 

Ischaemic heart disease was responsible for 8.9 million or 16 per cent of deaths globally in 2019, a figure that had risen by more than two million since 2001. 

The woman also had hypertension (high blood pressure) and atrial fibrillation (an irregular and often very rapid heart rhythm). 

At ESRF in France, the team used an X-ray technique called hierarchical phase-contrast tomography (HiP-CT) to image the hearts down to a scale of 20 micrometres. 

‘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,’ said Professor Lee. 

‘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.’ 

The researchers note that these are hearts taken from deceased donors for a good reason. 

It wouldn’t be possible to image a living person’s heart in this way as the radiation dose would be too high. 

It may be a while before this technique is routinely used though, as imaging for each heart generated 10 terabytes of data – 1 million times more than a standard CT scan. 

‘The main limiting factor is the processing of the very large data produced by HiP-CT,’ said Paul Tafforeau at ESRF, who invented the technique.

Experts think the images will provide an resource for better understanding cardiovascular disease – the name for various conditions that affect the heart or blood vessels, and the biggest cause of death worldwide. 

‘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. 

The new study has been published today in the journal Radiology. 

A showcase of the research will be featured at The Wonders, part of the UCL Festival of Engineering, on Friday 19 July at 7pm in the Bloomsbury Theatre.