http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/video-visualization-human-heart-could-help-doctors-predict-stroke-risk
Strokes kill someone every 4 minutes. To determine your risk,
doctors measure certain characteristics of your heart, such as its size
and pumping strength. However, researchers haven’t had the tools to
study how disease-induced structural changes in the heart might be
affecting heart function and blood flow. Now, an interdisciplinary team
of scientists says it has found a new way to analyze blood flow through one of the heart’s upper blood collection chambers—the
left atrium—which could lead to a better way to assess stroke risk in
patients. The researchers used specialized computerized tomography scans
to build visualizations of cardiac blood flow in two hearts: one with
healthy blood flow (above) and another with abnormal blood flow because
of heart disease. Their modeling shows that in the healthy heart, blood
flows through the left atrium in a tight corkscrew shape, which allows
blood to quickly exit that structure. However, in the enlarged, diseased
heart, this corkscrew shape never fully forms, which causes blood to
linger in the left atrium. As a result, the blood is more likely to pool
there, forming a stroke-causing clot, the team reports this month in
the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. The scientists hope
that future work will enable them to equip medical practitioners with
the ability to use computerized, personal cardiac blood flow
visualizations to assess stroke risk in their patients.
DOI: 10.1126/science.aal0360
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