paper-plane envelope home office pencil quill pen image images camera play bullhorn connection mic file-text2 file-picture file-music file-play file-video copy folder folder-open folder-plus folder-minus folder-download folder-upload price-tag price-tags ticket phone envelop pushpin location compass map map2 clock alarm fax mobile bubble bubbles user users user-plus user-minus user-check quotes-left quotes-right search pie-chart stats-dots stats-bars airplane cloud-download cloud-upload earth link flag eye eye-blocked arrow-up-left arrow-up arrow-up-right arrow-right arrow-down-right arrow-down arrow-down-left arrow-left2 share amazon google-plus google-drive facebook instagram twitter rss youtube flickr dropbox linkedin file-pdf file-openoffice file-word file-excel
XClose

HiP-CT
Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT)

Home
Menu

HiP-CT

Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT)

Anatomical to Cellular Synchrotron Imaging of the Whole Human body

HiP-CT

This project will achieve transformations in X-ray tomography technology by enabling cellular level imaging anywhere in whole organisms including human bodies, providing insight at multiple anatomical levels.

What is Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT)?

Prof Peter Lee, Drs Claire Walsh and Paul Tafforeau imaging the complete brain of a Covid-19 victim using HiP-CT , resolving cellular features (ca. one-micron resolution) in local areas.

Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT) is an X-ray technique which promises to decouple field of view and resolution to image anywhere in the human body with cellular (micron) resolution. The technique will enable the scanning of whole bodies with a resolution of 25 microns, thinner than a human hair and ten times the resolution of a medical CT scanner. Areas can then be selected to be zoomed in on, achieving local micron resolution, or one hundred times the resolution of medical CT.

Funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the project is an international interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and mathematicians at University College London (UCL), European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) and Diamond Light Source (DLS), and clinicians at Hannover-biobank, Mainz, Heidelberg, UCL and Imperial College London, together with many other collaborators. The imaging advances are based on the recent Extremely Brilliant Source (EBS) upgrade to the ESRF that has created the world’s first high-energy fourth-generation synchrotron, which is currently the brightest X-ray source in the world. Feasibility studies have already demonstrated it can resolve unprecedented detail revealing the damage caused by Covid-19 on human lungs, linking from the major airways all the way down to the finest micro-vasculature in an intact lung, as shown in the video below.

 

HiP-CT characterisation of the damage in a Covid-19 injured lung lobe zoom from the whole organ down to 2 micron resolution.

HiP-CT characterisation of the damage in a Covid-19 injured lung lobe zoom from the whole organ down to 2 micron resolution.

Detail of human lung tissue damaged by Covid-19

Back to top