The Broken Heart

Rather than being a symbol of love, a heart should be the symbol of life. Its pump-action keeps us alive, and more than a quarter of all deaths in the UK are due to heart attacks and other circulatory diseases. This striking picture – a winner of this year’s British Heart Foundation Reflections of Research awards – is a three-dimensional view of an adult mouse heart, produced using a technique called optical projection tomography (OPT). Similar to the way that a CT scan uses layers of X-rays to build up a 3D image of the body, OPT builds up pictures with light beams. The technology gives researchers a new view of healthy and diseased hearts, exposing them in exquisite detail. It’s enabling scientists to measure the amount of damage heart muscles sustain after a heart attack, illuminating what goes wrong during heart disease and revealing ways to fix it.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Dr Gillian Gray, Megan Swim and Harris Morrison
• University of Edinburgh
• Image courtesy of the British Heart Foundation