Heart gallery

Images that show bleeding inside the heart after people have suffered a heart attack have been captured by UK researchers.

The researchers, from the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre at Imperial College London, hope that this kind of imaging will be used alongside other tests to create a fuller picture of a patient’s condition and their chances of recovery.

People suffer heart attacks when an artery that feeds blood to the heart becomes blocked, stopping the heart's blood supply and depriving the heart muscle of oxygen. Currently, most people treated for a heart attack are fitted with a tube called a stent to keep the blocked artery clear.

Recent research has shown that some people experience bleeding inside the heart muscle once blood starts to pump into it again. However, the significance of this bleeding is currently not understood.

The researchers used Magnetic Resonance Imaging to capture the new images in 15 patients from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust who had recently suffered a heart attack. Analysis of the MRI scans revealed that the amount of bleeding correlated with how much damage the heart muscle had sustained.