(December 10, 2015) A
team of Oxford University researchers has developed a technique that could
improve heart scans for patients, giving more information about the heart than
traditional scans and without any injections, making them safer and faster.
The group of medical, physics and engineering researchers are
based at the Oxford Centre for Clinical Magnetic Resonance Research (OCMR).
They are using a property of hydrogen atoms to create a pixel-by-pixel map of
the heart, called a T1-map, which allows examination of healthy and diseased
heart tissue in greater detail than before.
Currently, stress scans of the heart using magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) require patients to be injected with two substances.
Adenosine is a medication injected into the patient that causes effects similar
to exercise during the scan. Gadolinium - a rare earth heavy metal - is
injected as a contrast agent to highlight areas of the heart suffering from
decreased blood flow under exercise conditions.