An international team of scientists and clinicians has announced the launch of a new open-access 3D portal that allows users to explore intact human organs in unprecedented detail--from the whole organ down to individual cells locally. The Human Organ Atlas, created using a powerful synchrotron imaging method, brings together some of the most detailed 3D images of human organs ever produced. It enables scientists, doctors, educators, students and the wider public to interactively "fly through" organs such as the brain, heart, lungs, kidney and liver, providing a new way of understanding human anatomy and human diseases.

Building on an initial release, the Human Organ Atlas (HOA) is now available in a greatly expanded form and can be accessed directly through a standard web browser, without specialized software. The technology is published in the journal Science Advances.

The Atlas is powered by an advanced imaging method called Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT), developed at the European Synchrotron (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, by an international team led by University College London (UCL), UK. HiP-CT uses the ESRF's Extremely Brilliant Source--a new generation of synchrotron source--which is up to 100 billion times brighter than conventional hospital CT scanners.

This allows researchers to scan entire intact ex vivo human organs non-destructively and then zoom in to near-cellular resolution (down to less than one micron, 50 times thinner than the size of a human hair). The technique bridges a century-old gap in medicine between radiology and histology, and represents a major advance in biomedical imaging.