IHE Colloquium: The Human Organ Project using the ESRF-EBS

The team led by Professor Peter Lee (UCL Mechanical Engineering) are seeking volunteers and collaborators to help analyse and utilise the healthy organ datasets to help solve problems in human health, development and disease.

ABSTRACT

Peter D. Lee, Claire Walsh, Simon Walker-Samuel, Joseph Jacob, Rebecca Shipley (UCL); Danny D. Jonigk, Max Ackermann, Willi Wagner, Mark Kuehnel, Christopher Werlein (Hannover/Mainz); Paul Tafforeau (ESRF)

X-ray tomography is a widely used technique for imaging biological structures in 3D where contrast is derived from the X-ray attenuation of the sample. mCT can achieve very high resolution (<1 micron) but only in tiny millimetre sized biopsies, as resolution is normally linked to field of view. With the European Synchrotron Research Facilities’ Extremely Bright Source upgrade to a 4th generation source (ESRF-EBS), we have decoupled resolution from specimen size using high energy phase propagation techniques. These phase contrast based techniques also provide up to 1000 times the sensitivity of attenuation contrast, enabling outstanding soft-tissue imaging.

Using high energy phase propagation tomography, we have resolved cellular scale structures with micron resolution in intact human organs including lungs, heart, brain and kidney, in health and disease (COVID-19). The goal is to couple the results to other imaging modalities– downscale to histology and omics data etc, upscale to clinical imaging CT, MRI etc. We also hope to use segmentation of vascular and airway geometries for modelling of physiological function, e.g. drug delivery and digital volume correlation for biomechanical modelling. We are seeking volunteers and collaborators to help analyse and utilise the healthy organ datasets to help solve problems in human health, development and disease.