Innovative X-ray shows COVID-19 can cause vascular damage to the heart: A study
Research team Significant changes in the myocardial tissue of people who have died of COVID-19 have been observed at the University of Gottingen and Hannover Medical School.
The study has been published in the “eLife Journal”.
Lung tissue damage has been the subject of research in this area for some time and has now been thoroughly investigated. The current study confirmed cardiac involvement in COVID-19 at the microscopic level for the first time by imaging and analyzing damaged tissue in three dimensions.
The researchers photographed the tissue architecture in high resolution using synchrotron radiation – particularly bright X-rays – and displayed it in three dimensions. To do this, they used a special X-ray microscope set up and used by the University of Gottingen at the German Electron Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg. They observed clear changes in the levels of capillaries (small blood vessels) in the heart muscle when they looked at their effects on the severe form of COVID-19 disease.
Compared to a healthy heart, X-ray of tissues with severe disease revealed a network full of fissures, branches, and loops that had been chaotically shaped as new blood vessels formed and ruptured. These changes are the first direct visual evidence of one of the major causes of lung damage in COVID-19: specific “intussusceptive angiogens” (meaning the formation of new blood vessels) in tissue.
To visualize the capillary network, the vessels of the three-dimensional volume first had to be identified by machine learning methods. This initially required researchers to carefully, manually tag the image data.
“To speed up image processing, we automatically divided the tissue architecture into its local symmetric properties and then compared them,” he explained. Marius Reichardt, University of Gottingen and first author.
“The parameters obtained from this then showed a completely different quality compared to healthy tissue or even diseases such as severe influenza or general myocardium,” explained the study leaders, the professor. Tim Salditt From the University of Gottingen and Professor Danny Jonigk From MHH.
There is a very special feature in this study: unlike in vascular architecture, the required quality of data was obtained with a small X-ray source in the laboratory of the University of Gottingen. In principle, this means that it could also be done in any clinic to support pathologists in routine diagnosis. In the future, researchers will want to further expand the approach to converting characteristic tissue patterns into abstract mathematical values in order to develop automated diagnostic tools, again by developing laboratory X-ray imaging and validating it with synchrotron radiation data. Cooperation with DESY will be further expanded in the coming years.
Source: ANI