The Winner

Mr Laurence Jackson, Medical Physics & Bioengineering

Muscle Fibres of the Heart

The heart is an extraordinarily complex muscle, providing the circulation of blood throughout the body. Both the muscular action which pumps the blood as well as the electrical pacing of these contractions depends heavily on the highly ordered muscle fibre architecture. This image was created using Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which uses the movement of water along these fibres to determine their orientation. The image shows the spiral structure of the myofibres around the left ventricular chamber, note that the inside and outside walls of the chamber spiral in different directions, contraction along these fibres causes an upwards twisting motion reducing the volume of the chamber and expelling the blood.

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