100,000 volunteers scanned in world-first imaging project

Scientists have completed full-body scans of 100,000 people in what is believed to be the world’s largest body imaging study.

The decade-long initiative has produced one billion anonymised images showing internal organs, blood vessels, bones and joints, which researchers can now use to explore how ageing and disease develop.

Each participant contributed around 12,000 images, including scans of the brain, heart, abdomen and other organs, along with genetic, health and lifestyle data.

The project was led by UK Biobank, which monitors the health of 500,000 people across Britain.

Early findings from image subsets have already contributed to discoveries about how heart structure affects psychiatric conditions and shown that the scans could predict dozens of future diseases.

They also suggest that no level of alcohol consumption is risk-free.

Naomi Allen, chief scientist at UK Biobank, said: “Researchers now have an incredible window into the body.

“For the first time, researchers can study how we age and how diseases develop in stunning detail and at a massive scale.

“We hope that the findings… will change the way the world detects and treats disease before people get sick.”

Paul Matthews, chair of the UK Biobank imaging group and professor of neuroscience at Imperial College London, said the high-resolution brain scans can detect changes as small as a teaspoon of water – just tenths of a per cent of total brain volume.

These previously invisible differences could help identify people at higher risk of dementia. The procedure is now being trialled in the NHS.

Other work based on the scans found that drinking one to two units of alcohol daily was associated with changes in brain size and structure, potentially contributing to memory loss and dementia.

Matthews said: “Unfortunately, there is no perfectly safe level and certainly no benefit to the brain from just a glass of wine a day.”

Patricia Munroe, professor of molecular medicine at Queen Mary University of London, is using the heart images to study genes that control both how the heart functions as a pump and how it is structured.

The scans capture complete heartbeat cycles, revealing where these genetic processes go awry.

Abdominal scans have shown that people with the same body mass index (BMI) and waist measurement can store fat very differently, affecting their heart disease risk and challenging the reliability of BMI as a diagnostic measure.

UK Biobank is now re-scanning 60,000 volunteers to observe how the brain, body and bones change over time.

Louise Thomas, professor of metabolic imaging at the University of Westminster, has analysed scans taken two years apart.

“The results were shocking. The amount of visceral fat, the bad fat in the abdomen, had increased,” she said. Muscle tissue also became fattier.

“As we get older, we become more and more marbled. We’re becoming wagyu beef.”

One of Thomas’s colleagues has automated the detection of aneurysms – life-threatening bulges in blood vessel walls.

Men are already screened for these under the NHS, but women are not, even though they are more dangerous in women.

“We can do lots of things we weren’t able to do before. It’s quite extraordinary,” Thomas added.