An open access portal now available online allows scientists, doctors, educators, students and the general public to explore intact human organs in an unprecedented level of detail, from whole brains, lungs, kidneys or livers down to their individual cells at the local level.

The Atlas of Human Organs, Created using a powerful synchrotron imaging method, it brings together some of the most detailed 3D snapshots of organs ever produced and provides a new way to understand anatomy and disease. It is “a window to the internal architecture” of the human body.

New generation synchrotron X-ray technology

The atlas is based on an advanced X-ray imaging method called hierarchical phase contrast tomography (HiP-CT), developed at the European Synchrotron (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, by an international team led by University College London (UCL), UK.

HiP-CT uses the so-called ESRF Extremely Bright Source, a new generation synchrotron source that is up to 100 billion times brighter than those from conventional hospital techniques.

This allows researchers to non-destructively scan intact human organs ex vivo and then upscale the image to near-cellular resolution (less than a micron, 50 times finer than the thickness of a human hair).

Scientific advances since the covid-19 pandemic

This technique bridges a century-old gap in medicine between radiology and histology and represents a great advance in the field of biomedical imaging, say those responsible, who publish the details this Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

It offers, they write in their article, “a comprehensive exploration of human anatomy, providing unparalleled insight into complex structures and their spatial relationships.”

Initially developed during the pandemic, the method has already led to several publications and scientific advances, revealing microscopic vascular lesions never before seen in the lungs of patients who died from Covid-19 or redefining the understanding of cardiac disorders.

The technology has also been applied to other organs, providing new insights into complex anatomical structures in health and disease, such as the pathogenesis of gynecological disorders.

Database with 65 human organs in 3D

This portal of the Atlas of Human Organs (HOA) is the result of more than five years of collaborative effort between numerous researchers, engineers, doctors and infrastructure specialists, united in the “Human Organ Atlas Hub”, a consortium in which nine institutes from Europe and the United States participate.

Previously, the team published the methodology itself, that is, how HiP-CT was developed, Claire Walsh, from UCL and director of the HOAHub, explains to EFE.

Today’s post is about the database created over the last five years using the HiP-CT technique. This contains hundreds of scans of many more organs than those included in the original article and makes the data available to a wide public, continues the scientist.

The atlas currently offers (although being updated) access to 65 organs (of 13 types) and 321 complete 3D data sets from 32 donors. The organs are: brain, heart, female genitalia, lung, kidney, liver, colon, spleen, placenta, uterus, prostate, eye and testicles.

The portal provides interactive visualization, downloadable datasets in multiple resolutions, tutorials and software tools for analysis and regular addition of new data.

Applications in medical artificial intelligence

Beyond advancing anatomical and biomedical research, it is expected to become an important resource for artificial intelligence. Large, high-quality 3D data sets are rare, limiting the development of advanced medical AI systems.

This “Google Earth”, according to those responsible, provides a hierarchical and curated data set ideal for training machine learning models for segmentation, disease detection and super-resolution analysis.

Currently the team works with isolated organs, but in the future they hope to develop the technique to obtain images of complete human bodies with a resolution between 10 and 20 times higher than the current one.

It can be accessed directly through a standard web browser (here), without the need for specialized software.

FEW (EFE, Atlas of Human Organs)