Imaging the Cardiac Diet: How Failing Hearts Burn Fuel
UMCG and NVision are developing a breakthrough imaging technology for heart failure. Together, they are creating something that could not be done before: watch the heart burn fuel in real time.
In the Netherlands, 240,000 people live with heart failure. It causes 34,000 hospital admissions each year and takes up about 1% of total healthcare spending. Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) is particularly devastating. While the heart often appears normal on standard scans, patients struggle to breathe, feel exhausted, and face survival rates worse than most cancers. The problem is metabolic. The heart takes up glucose but burns it incompletely, like an engine that misfires. This limits energy delivery, and without enough fuel, the heart cannot pump effectively. Doctors have no way to measure this energy crisis and are flying blind when choosing treatments.
NVision’s Hyperpolarised Carbon-13 MRI changes this. Their compact POLARIS platform measures cardiac metabolism quickly, accurately, and at clinical scale. By injecting a specially prepared, harmless tracer (pyruvate, similar to glucose) doctors can watch how the heart processes fuel in real time. Complete fuel burning produces bicarbonate and energy. Incomplete burning diverts fuel into lactate, wasting energy. Within seconds, the scan reveals whether and how severely the heart is energy-starved. This “cardiac diet imaging” identifies the metabolic crisis, shows which treatments work best, and tracks progress during therapy. It transforms an invisible problem into something visible and measurable.
This project tests the technology and creates standards that doctors and scientists can trust and use. We will build imaging protocols that work, identify which patients need which treatments, and show that the scan captures treatment effects. These results position the Netherlands to lead the global shift toward precision metabolic medicine in HFpEF, enabling tailored therapies that restore the heart’s fuel-burning capacity and improve patients’ lives.
