Completed Heart, Stroke & Blood Brain & Nervous System

New Horizons in Clinical Cardiac Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation University of Leeds
Funding £1.7M
Period Mar 2020 — Feb 2024

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A new scanner with magnets four times stronger than standard hospital machines is now being used to image the microscopic structure of a beating human heart. Current cardiac MRI techniques struggle to capture the fine detail of heart muscle tissue because the heart moves, stretches, and pumps blood during scanning. This motion blurs the images, and the magnetic field gradients on conventional clinical scanners are too weak to resolve the tiny spaces between heart muscle cells. As a result, doctors cannot easily detect the early, subtle changes in tissue architecture—known as remodelling—that signal worsening heart disease. By using the Connectome scanner, originally built for mapping the brain’s wiring, the researchers aim to develop new imaging techniques that can measure the diffusion of water molecules within the heart muscle with far greater precision. If successful, this work could lead to earlier and more accurate diagnosis of cardiac remodelling, allowing clinicians to intervene before the heart becomes irreversibly damaged. The project is fundamental science—it is not yet ready for the clinic—but it builds on the same kind of technical leap that transformed brain imaging, and could eventually change how heart disease is detected and monitored.

View original technical description
Remodelling of the heart is linked to a poor prognosis for patients with cardiac disease. While the mechanisms underpinning this process are only poorly understood, changes in the microstructural architecture of the myocardium are considered to play a key-role. Cardiac diffusion tensor imaging (cDTI) has enabled insights into the microstructure non-invasively through the assessment of the diffusion of water molecules in the myocardium. cDTI provides quantitative diffusion metrics such as Fractional Anisotropy, Mean Diffusivity and Helix Angle, which can serve as biomarkers of disease. Nevertheless, cDTI is technically challenging due to its sensitivity to motion, strain and perfusion. Moreover, the diffusion tensor is an oversimplified representation of the underlying tissue structure. More realistic tissue models as developed for the brain are presently prohibited by MR scanners hardware limitations, particularly magnetic field gradient strength. The aim of this project is to establish cardiac diffusion MRI on the Connectome scanner, which features gradients 4x stronger than those available on clinical scanners, in order to develop next generation MRI techniques for the non-invasive, microstructural characterisation of the beating heart in humans, with the ultimate aim to detect subtle remodelling of cardiac tissue earlier, and with higher accuracy than ever before.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Jurgen E Schneider (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Next-Generation Diffusion Tensor Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance to Characterise Cardiac Microstructure in Health and Disease
The cardiac microstructure in health and disease
Quantitative characterization of cardiac tissue microstructure from Diffusion Tensor Imaging
Investigation of post-myocardial infarction left ventricular remodelling by diffusion tensor cardiac magnetic resonance (Dr Ramyah Rajakulasingam)
Understanding the impact of the microvasculature on quantification of fibre orientation in the heart using Diffusion Spectrum MRI and computer models

Original classification

Investigator Award in Science

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