#Rays of hope 2019 upgrade

The team hopes the Human Organ Atlas will eventually contain a library of diseases that affect organs on a range of scales, from 1 to 100s of microns to entire organs, helping clinicians as they diagnose and treat a wide range of diseases. The researchers are confident that the scale-bridging imaging from whole organ down to cellular level could provide additional insights into many diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer's Disease. The Atlas will be available online for surgeons, clinicians and the interested public. There will also be a control lung biopsy and a COVID-19 lung biopsy.

The team is using HiP-CT to produce a Human Organ Atlas which will display six donated control organs: brain, lung, heart, two kidneys and a spleen, and the lung of a patient who died of COVID-19. Such cross-linking stops the patient's blood from being properly oxygenated, which was previously hypothesized but not proven. Using HiP-CT, the research team has seen how severe COVID-19 infection 'shunts' blood between the two separate systems - the capillaries which oxygenate the blood and those which feed the lung tissue itself. A clinical CT scan only resolves blood vessels that are about 100 times larger, around 1mm in diameter. 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.

#Rays of hope 2019 upgrade

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. 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. Scientists from University College London (London, UK) and the European Synchrotron Research Facility (ESRF Grenoble, France) 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. In life Rayanna's spirit and energy touched the lives of many.Using high-energy X-rays emitted by a special type of particle accelerator, scientists have intricately captured the damage caused by COVID-19 to the lungs' smallest blood vessels. Baldrick's Foundation and 'Rays of HOPE' hero fund it is our greatest wish that someday question marks about the future of a child diagnosed with childhood cancer will no longer exist. She fought the bravest of battles and never asked 'why.' Hope for a normal future was never a question mark. She was going to be a veterinarian when she grew up. Her love of animals showed with all of her pets a horse, a donkey, two cats, a rabbit and a dog. She loved living and everyone and everything around her. She, like so many others facing childhood cancer, did not allow cancer to define who she was. She was a beautiful giggly little girl filled with compassion for everyone around her, always putting the needs and feelings of everyone before her. Life without Rayanna's battles is the tiniest of memories and yet the tiniest part of who Rayanna is in our memory. Sadly, while Rayanna's immune system was suppressed to win a third battle (Graft Versus Host Disease), a life threatening fungus attacked her body and stole her from us.

The MDS battle was won with the help of her Uncle Bryan who was the perfect match for her stem cell transplant. She won that battle and won the battle three years later with MDS. Rayanna was a happy little three year old when she was diagnosed with ALL. As we know, all too well, heroes come in all sizes.