Brightest ever X-ray shows lung vessels altered by Covid-19

The damage caused by Covid-19 to the lungs' smallest blood vessels has been intricately captured using high-energy X-rays emitted by a special type of particle accelerator. Scientists from UCL and the European Synchrotron Research Facility (ESRF) used a new revolutionary imaging technology called Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT), to scan donated human organs, including lungs from a Covid-19 donor. HiP-CT enables 3D mapping across a range of scales, allowing clinicians to view the whole organ as never before by imaging it as a whole and then zooming down to cellular level. The technique uses X-rays supplied by the European Synchrotron (a particle accelerator) in Grenoble, France, which following its recent Extremely Brilliant Source upgrade (ESRF-EBS), now provides the brightest source of X-rays in the world at 100 billion times brighter than a hospital X-ray. Due to this intense brilliance, researchers can view blood vessels five microns in diameter (a tenth of the diameter of a hair) in an intact human lung. A clinical CT scan only resolves blood vessels that are about 100 times larger, around 1mm in diameter. Dr Claire Walsh (UCL Mechanical Engineering) said: "The ability to see organs across scales like this will really be revolutionary for medical imaging.