3D Imaging of the Beating Heart from Cardiac MRI (1988)

In 1988 for the first time the beating heart of a living human was reconstructed from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data.The original MRI data (acquired with a Siemens Magnetom device) consisted of 12 stacks with 28 images taken along the heart cycle. On the upper left the time course of the different cross-sections is shown.

The videos computed from these data were first presented in November 1988 at the Congress of the Radiological Society(RSNA) in Chicago (also in stereoscopic mode). Because of the substantially increased quality of MRI, today's (2016) reconstructions show much more detail. Yet the applied methods are basically still the same as those developed in 1988.