Faster and better heart imaging for improved patient care
Our cardiologists, physicists, and computer scientists have advanced cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) producing static and moving images of the heart in greater detail than ever before.
Strategic links with industry including, Siemens and Phillips, mean technological advances developed at UCLH are available to patients world-wide.
Having been incorporated into 14 international clinical guidelines, these techniques are revolutionising patient care not just locally, but globally.
Cardiac MRI has also become a standard test for assessing response to new drugs pushing the frontiers of treatment.
The UCLH team has made cardiac MRI faster (improving tolerability and patient experience), better (measuring structure and function, and now the biological changes leading to disease, to develop and evaluate targeted treatment) and more streamlined (using computer systems for image processing and interpretation).
Clinicians can now accurately identify early changes to heart muscle caused by inherited or lifestyle diseases, so that earlier treatment can prevent irreversible damage.
This has delivered benefits in the treatment of common and rare conditions (e.g., heart failure and familial heart muscle diseases) and led to insights into how the heart changes with age, athletic training, and pregnancy.
It has also revealed new unanticipated causes of disease such as deposition of abnormal proteins (amyloidosis) in the heart with age, from cancer or genetic diseases2.
Combined with electrical mapping, cardiac MRI is pinpointing sites of dangerous heart rhythms more accurately, so ablation treatment is now delivered more effectively.
Heart patients often receive lifesaving pacemakers. However, until recently, if they developed conditions, such as cancer or stroke, they were denied MRI scans because of safety concerns over electronic devices in magnetic scanners, delaying care.
The UCLH team, in partnership with Barts Heart Centre, developed safe protocols3 now in national guidance that give all heart patients access, increasing MRI scans four-fold for affected patients.
By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, UCLH-led innovations have accelerated the rate at which high quality MRI images are produced, processed, and interpreted3.
This means cardiac MRI can now be used routinely in the youngest children and infants, becoming a pivotal test in modern congenital heart disease care.
It also means cardiac MRI will become a routine, daily test, reducing NHS cost and increasing throughput, freeing clinicians for direct patient care.
References:
- Knott KD, Circulation, 2020
- Scully PR, European Heart Journal, 2020
- Bhuva A, European Heart Journal, 2021
