Pulsed Lasers Make Headway in Treating Cardiovascular Disease
Patients with heart disease often face a daunting journey from diagnosis to treatment. They may learn, after experiencing chest pains or shortness of breath, that they have arteriosclerosis, or damaged arteries, through a test such as a coronary angiogram, which shows via x-rays whether blood vessels are restricted. In extreme cases, coronary artery bypass surgery is performed, which is a highly invasive procedure with a lengthy recovery time. But due to the specificity made possible by laser-based techniques, shorter and more effective diagnostics and therapeutics are becoming increasingly viable in clinical settings.
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Intravascular Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Predicts Heart Attacks
Lipoproteins carry cholesterol through the closed-looped vascular hematological highway of the human body. This cholesterol can embed itself into the artery walls at varying rates, depending on a multitude of factors, such as anatomical influences or genetic predispositions. Cholesterol vascular wall infiltration triggers the body’s immune response to multiply collagen and muscle cells in these specific regions of vascular tissue, forming a fibrous cap over the lipid deposit. A progression of optical technologies has been put to work to capture these deposits — most recently, near-infrared spectroscopy, in conjunction with other modalities.
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Intravital Multiphoton Microscopy Captures Dynamics of the Beating Heart
Most people know the heart pumps blood to the body, but they may not realize that the blood that fills the four chambers of the heart provides no sustenance to the myocardium, or the heart muscle, itself. Instead, a separate blood supply, the coronary circulation, runs along the surface of the heart, penetrates the tissue, and branches into a network of capillaries. Blockages that decrease blood flow in the coronary circulation are the cause of heart attacks, which affect one American approximately every 39 seconds. Although the coronary arteries have been well studied, blood flow through the microscopic myocardial capillaries remains poorly understood. Fortunately, new techniques in multiphoton microscopy are helping to change this.
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