London, April 21 (IANS) In a major stride in cardiac research, German scientists have developed one of the world's most powerful magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems - nearly 150,000 times as strong as the earth's magnetic field - to provides the sharpest and clearest images of the beating heart ever recorded in medical history.

 
 The new MRI procedure will radically advance the capabilities of cardiac research by helping diagnose, treat and monitor cardiac malfunctions at a much earlier stage, the Journal for Magnetic Resonance Imaging reports, citing a statement of the the Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine.
 
 For such sharp cardiac imaging, new versions of multi-channel transmit and receive antennas, called radio-frequency coils, were developed at the Berlin Ultrahigh Field Facility (BUFF) located at Campus Buch in Germany.
 
 A joint collaboration among Charité, the Max  Delbrück Centre, the German Metrology Institute and Siemens Healthcare was initiated for this purpose, the statement said.
 
 "We correlated the image exposure with the heartbeat," explains the study investigator Prof Thoralf Niendorf.
 
 "Our procedure is immune to interference with strong magnetic fields so that we can compensate for the motion of the heart which results in high image quality free of cardiac motion induced blurring and artifacts," he added.