Human organs still hold many mysteries, and finding new ways to visualize the inside of our bodies could greatly advance the understanding of disease progression. A multidisciplinary European project team has developed a new imaging technique that bridges the gap between CT/MRI scans and microscope biopsies. The method has already produced micron-resolution 3D images of human lungs as well as a brain, heart, spleen, kidney and liver, and the team is targeting 2025 to image an entire torso. This Human Organ Atlas project was ranked #6 on the Project Management Institute's list of Most Influential Health Projects for 2022.
The project began at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France where x-rays are produced in a large particle accelerator. Synchrotron x-rays have much higher energy and coherence compared to those from conventional CT scanners. ESRF scientist Paul Tafforeau has used them to produce detailed tomographic (section-by-section) images of paleontological specimens including small dinosaur fossils and the inner skull of australopithecus sediba, an early human ancestor.
In 2020 ESRF completed the "Extremely Brilliant Source" (EBS), an upgrade that makes their x-rays 100 times brighter and more coherent than before. The EBS was an incredible project in itself - click to learn more about it and the Project Management behind it. Shortly after the upgrade, Dr. Tafforeau received an unexpected call from Peter Lee of University College London (a frequent synchrotron user) asking if the facility could help in reconstructing lung tissue samples from people who had died from COVID-19. Tafforeau realized that the same techniques he had used in paleontology might be used for high precision biological imaging.
Dr. Lee assembled a multinational project team of medical scientists, computer scientists, mathematicians and other imaging scientists to pursue the ideas. With more than 50 contributors widely dispersed and mostly virtual due to COVID lockdowns, careful project management was required to produce results in a short timeframe. See my November 2022 article for more on the role of PMs in these types of decentralized, "ecosystem" projects.
The technique they developed is called hierarchical phase-contrast tomography (HiP-CT). It can provide 3D reconstructions of intact human organs down to the cellular level. So much information is provided by the imagery that interpreting and applying it becomes a challenge all its own. However, specialists believe the rewards will be worth the effort. An image of an entire torso would provide a better, more holistic understanding of how a diseased organ interacts with healthy ones. A collaboration with Google has also been initiated to produce a publicly available version of the Organ Atlas with "satellite" views of complete organs down to "street" views of individual cells. Before long we may see a "Google Body" alongside Google Maps, Earth and Sky!
