Last month we visited the HiP-CT used by the Human Organ Atlas Hub (HOAHub) at the ESRF – The European Synchrotron in Grenoble! Our team was invited to try out our very first feasibility beamtime experiment. The HOAHub consists of an international association of eight research groups from various backgrounds, both medical and physics, with the aim of mapping entire human organs in cellular detail. It is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as part of an impulse to develop new biomedical imaging techniques.

We’ve received training from ESRF scientists to apply the HiP-CT to solve biomedical problems. It allowed us to get close to one of the most cutting edge techniques in tissue imaging. The technology enables whole intact organs to be examined at multiple scales all the way down to the cellular level. With help of the ESRF team we’ve been able to scan a whole colon at the resolution of 20 microns per voxel!

We thank all scientists of HOAhub; Paul Tafforeau, Hector Dejea I Velardo, Joseph Brunet, & Claire Walsh, ESRF – The European Synchrotron and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to be part of this ambitious project. And letting us use HiP-CT to map tissue in unprecedented detail and correlate it with morphological and molecular data. We see the HOAHub as an important bridge between anatomy, clinical pathology and radiology. And a big thanks to our own team; Bernadette de Bakker, Yousif Dawood, Jermo Hanemaaijer, Daniël Docter, & Jaco Hagoort!