University College London Archives - Medical Design Sourcing

This ECG imaging vest could predict sudden cardiac death risk

UCL medical student Mansoon Tamang in the ECGI vest. [Image courtesy of UCL Institute of Cardiovascular Science /James Tye]

Researchers say they developed an electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) vest that could help predict sudden cardiac death risk.

A team at University College London (UCL) says detailed mapping of the heart’s electrical activity was previously rare. It either required catheter insertion or single-use devices that prove costly and time-consuming. Plus, those devices could involve radiation.

This team designed a reusable, time-efficient ECGI vest — which requires just five minutes per patient — with the potential for use in standard care. Dr. Gaby Captur of the UCL Institute of Cardiovascular Science and Royal Free Hospital, London, developed the vest. Researchers published their work in a paper in the Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance.

“We identified a problem in …

Super bright X-rays offer insights into how COVID-19 damages the lungs

HiP-CT provided a close-up of the lung lobe of a 54-year-old male COVID-19 victim. The image shows the airspaces in cyan, open blood vessels in red and blocked blood vessels in yellow. [Image courtesy of Paul Tafforeau, lead scientist at ESRF]An international team has used super-bright X-rays to capture intricate details of COVID-19 lung damage — and much more.

Their technique — called Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT) — relies on X-rays from the European Synchrotron Research Facility particle accelerator in Grenoble, France. Following its Extremely Brilliant Source upgrade (ESRF-EBS), European Synchrotron can produce X-rays 100 billion times brighter than a hospital X-ray. They’re the brightest X-rays in the world, according to the researchers.

The result is that researchers can view blood vessels that are five microns in diameter — a tenth of the diameter of a hair — in an intact, donated human lung. The tiny size is 100 times smaller than th…

Super bright X-rays offer insights into how COVID-19 damages the lungs

HiP-CT provided a close-up of the lung lobe of a 54-year-old male COVID-19 victim. The image shows the airspaces in cyan, open blood vessels in red and blocked blood vessels in yellow. [Image courtesy of Paul Tafforeau, lead scientist at ESRF]

An international team has used super-bright X-rays to capture intricate details of COVID-19 lung damage — and much more.

Their technique — called Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT) — relies on X-rays from the European Synchrotron Research Facility particle accelerator in Grenoble, France. Following its Extremely Brilliant Source upgrade (ESRF-EBS), European Synchrotron can produce X-rays 100 billion times brighter than a hospital X-ray. They’re the brightest X-rays in the world, according to the researchers.

The result is that researchers can view blood vessels that are five microns in diameter — a tenth of the diameter of a hair — in an intact, …