A new scanning technique is already providing insights into how COVID-19 damages and reshapes the blood vessels of the lungs
When Paul Tafforeau saw his first experimental scans of a COVID-19 victim’s lung, he thought he had failed. A paleontologist by training, Tafforeau had been laboring with a team strewn across Europe for months to turn a particle accelerator in the French Alps into a revolutionary medical scanning tool.
“What is perhaps a surprise to most people is we’ve been studying the heart anatomically since hundreds of years ago,” says UCL cardiac anatomist Andrew Cook, “but there isn’t a consensus about the normal structure of the heart, particularly the muscle cells, and how it changes as the heart beats.”UCL senior postdoctoral fellow Claire Walsh, one of HiP-CT’s co-creators, monitors the control cabin of BM05, the ESRF facility where the Human Organ Atlas’s first scans were carried out.
Using this technique, Ackermann and Jonigk compared the tissues of people who hadn’t died of COVID-19 with those who had. They immediately saw that among COVID-19 victims, the smallest blood vessels in the lungs were distorted and reshaped. These landmark results,, showed that COVID-19 wasn’t strictly a respiratory disease but a vascular one—one that could affect organs across the entire body.
“At the end of the day, [the] lung is oxygen in, carbon dioxide out—but for that, it has thousands and thousands of miles of blood vessels and capillaries that are so finely and nicely arranged … it’s almost a miracle,” says Jonigk, the founding principal investigator of the German Center of Lung Research.
Enter Tafforeau, whose work at the ESRF has stretched the limits of what synchrotron scans can see. His impressive bag of tricks previously let scientists peer inside dinosaur eggs and virtually unwrap mummies, and almost immediately, Tafforeau confirmed that the synchrotron could, in theory, make a good scan of an entire lung lobe. But actually scanning a whole human organ posed a grand challenge.
Lee and his team at UCL rushed to devise containers that could withstand the synchrotron’s x-rays but also let through as many waves as possible. Lee also juggled the project’s overall organization—such as the finer points of shipping human organs between Germany and France—and recruited Walsh, who specializes in huge biomedical datasets, to help work out how to analyze the scans.
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