A European study has launched a new open-source portal featuring 3D images of human organs with unprecedented detail, providing a new way to understand human anatomy and diseases.  

The team of clinicians and scientists led by the University College London (UCL), UK, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), France, obtained images from 65 organs, from 32 donors and 13 types of organs, namely brain, heart, lung, kidney, liver, colon, eye, spleen, placenta, uterus, female genitalia, prostate and testis.  

The images were obtained using an advanced imaging technique, called Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT), that allows researchers to scan entire organs from deceased donors and obtain images with resolution close to single-cell. The images were made freelyavailable in a user-friendly portal that can be accessed directly in an internet browser without requiring special software.  

In previous works, the same type of images has already contributed to important findings, including how gynaecological diseases develop and discovering lung injuries in people who died from Covid-19. Beyond contributing to biomedical research, the portal is suited to trainartificial intelligence models to improve disease detection, as well as to medical education and public engagement, allowing exploration by anyone curious about the human body.   

Paul Tafforeau, ESRF scientist and co-author of the portal and article published in Science Advances, said: “Currently we work on isolated organs, but in the future, we expect to develop the technique [HiP-CT] to be able to image complete human bodies with a resolution 10 to 20 times higher than what is possible today. Such data could transform how anatomy is studied and understood.”