With perspective to knowledge
A special process makes body tissue and entire organs transparent. With its help, entire body parts can be examined under a microscope and perhaps even artificial organs can be grown.
In the 16th century, the Flemish surgeon Andreas Vesalius set new standards in medical imaging with his pioneering anatomical drawings. In the five centuries that have passed since then, there have been numerous innovations in the field. But doctors are still largely barred from looking inside intact organs and analyzing the structures there down to the level of individual cells. Doctors could use it, for example, to observe cancerous metastases that break away from a tumor, or to identify aneurysms (blood vessel dilation) and other changes that pose he alth risks. Researchers could use it to study the structure of the brain or map the fine network of the kidneys in detail. Such information may one day even make it possible to cultivate replacement organs based on precise "blueprints". But until recently, the imaging techniques required didn't exist.
Even the fantastic images of today's magnetic resonance imaging (MRT) and computed tomography (CT) result in "only" a resolution in the millimeter range. This level of detail is impressive and makes it possible to diagnose numerous diseases or, for example, to observe the blood flow through the cerebral vessels. However, it is far too coarse to map the cellular structures of the organism. The latter requires a resolution in the range of micrometers (millionths of a meter).
To study body organs in such detail, scientists often use traditional histological tissue sections. They divide the respective organ into micrometre-thin slices and stain them with special substances in order to highlight certain tissue structures. They then scan each slice individually, obtaining thousands of images that they put together on the computer to reconstruct the organ's overall structure. In 2013, for example, Katrin Amunts and her colleagues from the Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine in Jülich published a high-resolution, three-dimensional model of the human brain called "BigBrain". The researchers had put together 7,404 slices of the brain of a previously deceased 65-year-old over several years. Something like this requires an enormous amount of work and produces impressive results that are far from ideal. Because cutting up the organ changes and damages the tissue, and individual cuts can be lost in the process…
