Imaging technique allows the visualisation of arterial plaque

Crucially, it should allow clinicians to make more accurate decisions about how best to treat their patients, for example, by suggesting lifestyle changes or adapting their medical treatment.

‘I imagine we could come up with an index for plaque burden that would hopefully have a high prognostic value. This could be added to the Framingham risk factor [the current gold-standard model for heart disease], where you have smoking, hypertension, cholesterol and perhaps plaque burden,’ said project lead Prof Rene Botnar from the Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at King’s College London.

The build-up of fatty materials such as cholesterol leads to a chronic inflammatory response in the walls of arteries — collectively referred to as atherosclerosis.

As the main causal factor behind heart disease and stroke, atherosclerosis can be considered the biggest single cause of death in Western societies, so there is considerable impetus to develop effective surveillance.

However, current procedures either fail to visualise the artery walls (such as X-ray) or risk damaging artery walls (for example, intravascular ultrasound), thus they are not suitable for routine screening of atherosclerosis in large populations.