Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT) is a new imaging technology that enables 3D mapping, which gives doctors and experts a chance to view an organ on a whole new level. The technology images an organ as a whole and manages to zoom down to cellular level. That’s some high-level imaging right there.
Scientists from UCL and the European Synchrotron Research Facility (ESRF) took advantage of the technology to scan donated human organs, including lungs from a donor who got Covid-19. The HiP-CT uses X-rays with the highest energy provided by the European Synchrotron (a particle accelerator) in Grenoble, France. Their X-rays are 100 billion times brighter than a hospital X-ray. This high energy allowed the researchers to view the blood vessels in the lung to see how severe Covid-19 infection ‘shunts’ blood between the two separate systems – the capillaries which oxygenate the blood and those which feed the lung tissue itself.
According to Danny Jonigk, Professor of Thoracic Pathology, (Hannover Medical School, Germany), “by combining our molecular methods with the HiP-CT multiscale imaging in lungs affected by COVID-19 pneumonia, we gained a new understanding how shunting between blood vessels in a lung’s two vascular systems occurs in Covid-19 injured lungs, and the impact it has on oxygen levels in our circulatory system."
Image credits: UCL News , Paul Tafforeau