Clinical application of hyperpolarized magnetic resonance imaging in the healthy, hypertrophied and failing human heart

A new imaging technique amplifies MRI signals by orders of magnitude, allowing doctors to watch the human heart’s metabolism in real time for the first time. Standard MRI struggles to detect metabolic activity in the heart because the signals are too weak. This technique, called hyperpolarized MRI, solves that problem by boosting the signal strength dramatically. The researchers have already shown it works in healthy and diabetic hearts. Now they want to refine the technology—developing new metabolic probes and advanced mapping sequences—and then use it to identify the specific metabolic signatures of healthy, hypertrophied, and failing human hearts. If successful, this work could transform how heart disease is diagnosed and treated. Instead of relying on indirect measures of heart function, clinicians could directly see which metabolic pathways are broken in a given patient. That would enable earlier diagnosis, more targeted therapies, and a way to monitor whether a treatment is actually working. The project is applied clinical research with a clear path to patient benefit, not fundamental science. It addresses a specific technical bottleneck—low MRI sensitivity—that has kept cardiac metabolism invisible, and aims to make it routinely visible within five years.