Human Organ Atlas
- marketingc8
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
To use a scientific term, wow,
Take a moment and check out the Human Organ Atlas.
Tag line: “Imaging the body from micron to whole organ scale.”
Publicly available for free online, the project offers images of 65 total organs (from 32 donors) and 321 datasets.
“These images are released openly,” the website asserts, “to allow exploration and reused, with the hope that they will provide new insights into our biological makeup in health and disease.”
The atlas uses an “advanced imaging technique” called Hierarchical Phase-Contracts Tomography (or HiP-CT). You can learn more about that technique here.
This is a work in progress, from what we can tell. Recently, the first set of eyes was added to the atlas.
The website emphasizes that the project is dedicated to making the data “findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.” And each dataset is accompanied by metadata about the donor, the organ scanned, and the scanning conditions.
The project is a collaboration between UCL (London’s oldest university) and ESRF in Grenoble, France. (ESRF stands for the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility.) Funding is from a whole range of organizations including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the German Registry of COVID-19 Autopsies, the UK Medical Research Council, The Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Wellcome Trust.
The site couldn’t be easier to navigate. And browse. Check out this page to search by organ—brain, colon, eye, female genitalia, heart, kidney, liver, lung, placenta, prostate, spleen, testis, uterus. Or adjust your own search parameters here by sex, age, and even pathology using this page.
We highly recommend watching the nine-minute “Guide to Neuroglancer” tutorial here. And try not to let your mind be blown about the resolution of the data.
Final thought: This project is giving the initials “HOA” a positive makeover.
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