March 2021 ESRFnews 17

ANATOMICAL IMAGING

Jon Cartwright

with very high contrast and at a resolution down to 1 μm finer than the size of the tiniest blood vessels without making a single incision. This opens up the possibility of truly holistic histology , says Jonigk, whereby medics are able to dispatch with much of the guesswork of clinical CT imaging and scrutinise entire diseased organs and bodies with total freedom, zooming in and out almost as easily as you might explore a new city on Google Maps. Why this is important depends very much on the disease in ques- tion. With COVID-19, there has been speculation that people die not due to the sheer amount of lung damage, but due to the connectedness of that damage a pathol- ogy that conventional histology would struggle to assess. This has never been done before, says Jonigk. There are potentially field-altering implications it could open up a whole new level of sophisticated diagnosis. HiP-CT could be viewed as the latest milestone in a

history of anatomical imaging that began with the draw- ings of Leonardo da Vinci in the 16th century. That his- tory also includes the Visible Human Project of the US National Library of Medicine, in which, since the 1980s, three entire cadavers have been photographed in approx- imately millimetre-deep cross-sections. Were HiP-CT to be used for a similar purpose, as it is hoped, it would not only be a giant leap in resolution. As it is non-destructive, it takes only a few days rather than years indeed, dozens of organs with different pathologies have already been scanned. A new dedicated microtomography beamline, BM18, under construction at the ESRF will enable entire cadavers to be scanned in a similar time. The long-term goal is a complete atlas of the body,

both in health and as affected by different diseases and conditions. As Lee points out, by way of example, the Hanover Biobank holds well-preserved lungs affected

by all sorts of pulmonary diseases going all the way back to the Spanish Flu of 1917. We can compare COVID-19 with all these previous diseases, at the cellular, vascular and tissue level, to establish if there may be medicines or treatments used for those that could be effective against COVID-19 and indeed future viruses. With the grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,

seven research positions will be established a vital boost to a project that has, until now, been carried out with- out any dedicated funding. The award of this grant is a clear sign of trust into the potential of the ESRF EBS for breakthrough research of the highest impact, enabled by the provision of synchrotron X-ray beams with unprece- dented brilliance and coherence, says Harald Reichert, ESRF director of research. Lee puts it more succinctly: None of this would have been possible without the EBS.

BM18 preview So far, Tafforeau and his colleagues, who include ESRF microtomography engineer Elodie Boller, have per- formed HiP-CT imaging on seven complete lungs, as well as a brain, heart, kidney, spleen and liver, all on BM05, an ESRF in-house beamline. However, there is already a palpable excitement for the technique that extends far beyond the ESRF and its international collaborators. The BM05 images are merely a preview of what will be possible on BM18, which has been designed to maximise the capa- bilities of the new source, employing the highest X-ray energies. It is expected to open to users next year. Who knows what scientists will see? All this time, I have

been doing my research under a dim candle, says Jonigk. Then you all come along and throw on the light switch. 

Last summer, ESRF microtomography pioneer Paul Tafforeau shifted from palaeontological to medical imaging, to help pathologists understand COVID-19 and other diseases.

PA U L TA

FF O R E A U /E S R F

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