Peer Inside the Human Body With These Amazing Images and GIFs

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A new CT scanner gives scientists—and magazine editors—a better look at the "plumbing" of the body. GE Reports
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Douglas Main is a journalist who lives in New York City and whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, Smithsonian, Nautilus, LiveScience, Discover Magazine, Popular Mechanics and elsewhere. He once worked in a lab studying drugs derived from the Amazon rainforest, before switching to writing about weird animals in the Amazon and many other topics, from science to health to the environment. When he isn’t exploring city or forest he likes to play basketball, read and go to concerts. He’s not fond of Oxford commas.

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Consider for a moment that every instant of consciousness and healthy bodily function is brought to you, in large part, by a steady supply of blood to your vital organs. You know it happens via an intricate assemblage of blood vessels, but this isn't the sort of thing that you can usually see.

Now, thanks to a new CT scanner built by GE, doctors and researchers can see high-quality images of blood vessels, bones and organs in real-time. The West Kendall Baptist Hospital in Florida became the first hospital to employ the technology in September 2014, and has produced a few stunning images for the public to see. The technology works by sending narrow-beam X-rays through the body, which are absorbed in different quantities by the various tissues, producing thin slices of images that are stitched into a 3-D configuration by a computer.

Here's a look at the blood vessels inside the skull:

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A look at the blood vessels inside the skull. GE Reports

And now for a slightly creepier angle, in which the skull melts away:

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GE Reports

The scanner was also used to look at other areas of the body. Here you can see the aorta, various organs within the abdomen and the two femoral arteries traveling down into each leg.

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GE Reports

A still of the aorta, showing the kidneys and the heart:

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GE Reports

And finally, a look at the blood vessels of the heart, where the process of circulation begins:

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GE Reports

You can see even more images like this at GE Reports.

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