Looking for first beats of developing heart

Part of the problem is that there are no good ways of directly observing a young embryo's heart, where blood begins flowing early in development. Scientists can potentially study this process using fertilized chicken eggs, observing as the chicken embryo forms. In the earliest days of the heart's development, however, the organ is so small that there is no way to image it without harming the embryo.

Now Anjul Davis and colleagues at Duke University and the University of Cincinnati have come up with a new way of measuring blood flow and imaging the structure of the heart in a developing chicken embryo. They have combined two optical techniques called "spectral-domain optical coherence tomography" and "spectral Doppler velocimetry" and their work provides some of the first insights into the mechanism of blood flow at the earliest stages of heart development.

A chicken's heart is very similar to a human's; by studying embryonic heart development in chickens we can better understand and develop treatments for congenital heart disease in humans, says Davis. Understanding how congenital heart defects arise would be a boon for humanity, Davis says, because evidence suggests that earlier interventions for people born with heart defects saves lives and improves the quality of life.

The technology can also be applied to studying blood flow in cancer tumors or in the tiny blood vessels in the brain, says Davis, whose research was funded by National Institutes of Health. -Optical Society of America