The Google Earth of the human body: online a journey through human organs like you have never seen before

An unprecedented itinerary through brain, heart, lungs, kidneys, and liver, but also uterus, placenta, spleen, prostate, and testicles. This is the promise of the new Atlas of Human Organs: an online platform, modeled after Google Earth, that allows users to explore intact organs in 3D with an unprecedented level of detail, down to the cellular scale.

Created with the European super microscope Esrf (European Synchrotron Radiation Facility) in Grenoble, the portal makes available over 50 organs from 25 donors.

An interactive tool without precedent, aimed at scientists, doctors, educators, students, and anyone who wants to better understand human anatomy and pathologies.

The project, the result of six years of work, is described in Science Advances by the Human Organ Atlas Hub consortium, which brings together nine institutes across Europe and the United States.

“From the beginning, we wanted this data to be accessible to everyone and to build an open and shared scientific infrastructure on a global scale,” says Paul Tafforeau of Esrf. “This is a resource for researchers, doctors, educators, but also for anyone curious about how the human body is made.”

The Atlas, accessible at https://human-organ-atlas.esrf.eu, is based on a sophisticated imaging technique, hierarchical phase contrast tomography (HiP-CT), which leverages the extremely bright source of Esrf: a next-generation synchrotron up to 100 billion times brighter than conventional hospital CT scanners.

The technology allows for the non-destructive acquisition of entire human organs ex vivo and subsequent magnification to a nearly cellular resolution, less than a thousandth of a millimeter, equivalent to about fifty times the thickness of a hair.

This way, a historical gap between radiology and histology is bridged, marking a crucial advancement in biomedical imaging.

Datasets can reach sizes of hundreds of gigabytes and, in some cases, exceed a terabyte; the largest, related to a brain, reaches 14 terabytes.

To ensure global access, the platform offers interactive browser viewing, without the need for dedicated software, as well as downloadable packages in various resolutions, tutorials, and analysis tools.

“We are opening a new window on the internal architecture of the human body,” emphasizes Tafforeau. “After six years of efforts, we are just at the beginning. Currently, we are working on isolated organs, but in the future, we plan to develop the technique to visualize complete human bodies with a resolution 10 to 20 times higher than the current one. This data could transform the way anatomy is studied and understood.”

In addition to advancing anatomical and biomedical research, the Atlas is set to become a key resource for training advanced artificial intelligence systems in the medical field, promoting increasingly precise analyses and diagnoses.