New Images Reveal the Ravaged Landscape of COVID-19 Lungs in Unprecedented Detail

The COVID-19 contagious illness, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus first identified in Wuhan, China in December 2019, resulted in a pandemic due to its rapid global spread. Symptoms of COVID-19, which can vary, including fever, coughing, headaches, exhaustion, breathing issues, loss of smell, and loss of taste, may appear one to fourteen days after virus exposure. It needs to be stated that only one-third of people who are inflamed revel in any signs. Slight to moderate signs and symptoms, together with moderate pneumonia, are experienced by most sufferers who've symptoms, whilst excessive or important symptoms, which include dyspnea, hypoxia, or respiratory failure, are skilled via a smaller proportion.

Severe symptoms are more common in older individuals. Organ damage has also been observed, as well as long-term effects of COVID-19 that some people experience, and ongoing research aims to understand these effects.

A cutting-edge imaging technique has been developed by researchers to understand COVID-19-damaged lungs at the cellular level. In severe respiratory illnesses like pneumonia, infection can cause blood vessels in the heart and lungs to swell, creating abnormal channels between certain parts of the pulmonary system that should not be connected. COVID-19 infections can also create similar channels, allowing unoxygenated blood to bypass the checkpoint and re-enter the body without picking up any oxygen. Hypoxemia, or low blood oxygen levels, is believed to be experienced by some COVID-19 patients due to this phenomenon.

Images of these warped structures, sharper than ever before, are produced by the imaging method known as Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT), which has 100 times the resolution of a conventional CT scan. The researchers aim to create a visual database of not only COVID-19-infected lungs but also healthy organs throughout the body using HiP-CT scans and the world's brightest X-rays at the European Synchrotron particle accelerator. The Human Organ Atlas, a database containing HiP-CT scans of everything from brains to kidneys, is being developed by the international team. The method is expected to improve understanding of pulmonary conditions and assist researchers in developing cures