Microbubbles illuminate a rainbow web of blood vessels

[Nipuna]

(Image: Kirsten Christensen-Jeffries/King's College London)

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Ramming bubbles into blood vessels doesn't sound healthy. But inject tiny bubbles into the narrowest veins and you can see previously invisible detail in an ultrasound image.

To create this image, Kirsten Christensen-Jeffries and colleagues from King's College London used standard ultrasound imaging to peer into the minute blood vessels in a mouse's ear. They added bubbles as small as red blood cells – less than 10 micrometres across – to locate the veins more accurately than ever before.

The image also reveals blood flow. The colours represent the direction blood is travelling in adjacent veins, and greater brightness indicates faster speed.

The ability to see such small blood vessels could some day help doctors detect early signs of damage in the circulatory system or map new veins that signal the growth of a cancerous tumour. The next step will be creating the images in real time – this one took about 10 minutes to produce, including computer processing.

Journal reference: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, DOI: 10.1109/tmi.2014.2359650