Cardiologist Bijoy Khandheria has been fixing broken hearts for more than three decades, listening to their muffled gallop and watching their grainy forms emerge and disappear, like some deep-sea life forms, on monitors in his darkened office. “Traditionally, ultrasound has allowed us to see the heart but not in as much detail as we might like,” he says. “We used the signal to image the heart layer by layer, almost like a butcher using a knife, and then mentally splice the layers together to see the whole picture,” he says. “The process has always involved some guesses.”
