New scanning technique could reveal severity of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy

Multidimensional diffusion encoding MRI: Novel imaging biomarkers of tissue microstructure in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy

In hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, heart muscle cells lose their normal highly-ordered arrangement and become more randomly arranged. There is also a thickening and stiffening of the heart muscle wall, called fibrosis. This thickening makes it harder for your heart to pump blood around your body. The severity of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is usually assessed using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan of the heart. But this is unable to provide enough detailed information about heart muscle cell arrangement and fibrosis. In this project, Dr Teh is developing a new type of scan called multidimensional diffusion encoding (MDE) MRI. MDE is much better at showing the size, shape and arrangement of heart muscle cells, and could provide a way of assessing the extent of abnormal cell arrangement and fibrosis there is in the heart. But one of the challenges with any heart scan is the movement caused by breathing and heart beating. Dr Teh is also designing ways to prevent this movement affecting the pictures taken by the scan. If successful, this will be the first time MDE has been used to scan the beating heart. It is hoped that the information provided by this new scanning technique will help doctors identify those people who are most at risk of problems caused by the condition – including sudden death, heart failure or stroke.