Zoom and Enhance

From a satellite view of the Earth you can zoom into your town, street, and individual house. Can you keep zooming, to see yourself, then your organs, and then each individual cell that makes up your body? That’s what a new technique, using the world’s brightest X-rays from a particle accelerator, offers. The ability to see detail like this, in its three-dimensional context, could help answer important clinical questions and better understand how disease affects the body. By revealing the key structures at each level – organ, tissue, and cell, each shown in the video of a sample human lung – in exquisite detail the researchers are developing an atlas of human organs for other scientists and clinicians to study. A deceased COVID-19 patient’s lung was visualised, showing for the first time key structural impacts the disease has, and showcasing the technique’s potential for revealing hidden details of the human body.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video from work by C. L. Walsh and colleagues
• Department of Mechanical Engineering and Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging, University College London, London, UK
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, November 2021