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The Broken Heart
30 August 2013

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

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BPoD stands for Biomedical Picture of the Day. Managed by the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences until Jul 2023, it is now run independently by a dedicated team of scientists and writers. The website aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biology, and its influence on medicine. The ever-growing archive of more than 4000 research images documents over a decade of progress. Explore the collection and see what you discover. Images are kindly provided for inclusion on this website through the generosity of scientists across the globe.

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