HOA, The Human Organ Atlas

Screenshot of the Human Organ Atlas portal. Credit: ESRF/UCL

HOA, The Human Organ Atlas, is open source & totally awesome, a treasure trove of science
available to all, is on line, ready to be accessed as needs warrant. :)

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.

Fig. 1. Overview of the HOA. Features include open data download, search tools based on metadata, image/video galleries, browser-based visualization, and registeredhierarchical datasets. “Applications” show some of possible uses that the hOA has and will enable for researchers around the world, including anatomical visualization andtraining; studying multisystemic disease, e.g., cOvid- 19 and hypertension; machine learning image segmentation challenges [panel adapted from (30), reproduced undera creative commons Attribution 4.0 international license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)]; and mapping of texture features such as white matter orienta-tion in the brain.

How cool is that? :)