MICA: High speed, high resolution imaging of excitable cell networks

A single heartbeat sends a wave of electrical activity through every cell in the heart in less than a second, and a new imaging facility will capture those rapid signals for the first time. The heart and brain run on fast electrical impulses. When those signals go wrong, the result can be a heart arrhythmia or an epileptic seizure. But researchers cannot see how these electrical surges actually spread through tissue, because existing imaging tools are too slow. A single electrical wave moves across an entire organ in the time it takes a camera to snap one frame. This project builds a high-speed imaging facility that combines two new optical engineering techniques to track these events in real time. If it succeeds, the facility will let scientists watch how electrical activity breaks down in cardiac and neurological disease. That could reveal where arrhythmias start, how seizure activity spreads, and which cells trigger the cascade. The work is fundamental science—it does not promise a new drug or device tomorrow. But understanding the basic choreography of electrical signals in excitable tissue is a prerequisite for designing better treatments, just as mapping the heart’s anatomy was necessary before surgeons could repair it.