How Science Imaging Makes the Invisible Visible

The Wellcome Trust’s 2014 image awards, held last night in London, celebrated the art and utility of some awesome science imaging techniques, from tried and trusted tools like electron microscopy to more cutting-edge methods like “dual-energy computed tomography."

Under the title “Come Closer,” applicants entered images of everything from cancer cells to kidney stones, headlice to microorganisms. Catherine Draycott, who heads Wellcome Images and was one of the judges, told me that what they look for is “the impact of the image visually, plus their effectiveness at conveying complex scientific information.”

“Pretty much all of them are produced for scientific purposes,” she said. “Generally speaking, the images in the Wellcome Image Awards are not art; generally speaking, they are ways of seeing something real more clearly.”

Most of the images make the invisible visible, either by zooming in on something too small to be picked out by the human eye, or cutting through external layers to show what lies underneath.

She talked me through some of the highlights.

This image by Swedish scientist Anders Persson was crowned the winner at an awards ceremony in London last night. It shows a mechanical heart pump inside a patient waiting for a heart transplant, and was taken using a the new dual-energy CT technique.

“The images are created using virtual slices of the patient’s chest using x-rays and CT scans and the doses of radiation are quite low so that makes it safer,” explained Draycott. “The images are put together to make a 3D model, which can then be rotated, magnified as required, so you can zoom in and go through the skin, under the muscles, through the rib cage—to the point that you can see the sternum there with the big staples in it."

Persson also submitted these images of a seal’s head, which are a good illustration of how the technique works. One shows it at the layer of the skin, the other at the layer of the skeleton.

It’s the same technology as is used in digital autopsies, to image a full body without having to slice it and dice it, or even remove it from the body bag.

From MIT, this image shows a birds-eye view of nerve fibres in a healthy adult brain. “What’s actually being imaged is the water and the movement of the water within the brain,” said Draycott. It was made using type of MRI scan called diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging, and the fibres are colour-coded to show the direction of water flow.

The green fibres go from the eye sockets on the left of the image towards the back of the head on the right; the blue go from the top of the head down to the neck; and the red go from ear to ear.

Images taken with scanning microscopy show the surface of an object, rather than what’s inside it. Draycott highlighted this image of calcifying tissue in a human heart as a good example of what her organisation sets out to do: “It’s not only helpful to scientists, whose using it to see more in order to aid the research; it’s useful to members of the public who can see something that will resonate, possibly with them, possibly with someone they know, about the hardening of the arteries and what that actually looks like at a microscopic level.”

This image hasn’t been false coloured—the actual data coming from the microscope is colour-coded according to density, with the orange blobs presenting the most dense, calcified material.

This shows a cluster of breast cancer cells that have been treated with nanocarriers—nanometre-sized particles that carry an anti-cancer drug doxorubicin. The purple cells are dying; the blue are living cancer cells.

It illustrates an area of scientific research that could have great benefits in medicine. “The nanocarriers can be genetically modified to recognise some kinds of tumour cells and deliver the drug to the intended target,” explained Draycott. “If scientists can find ways of just targeting the tumour, it would mean you wouldn’t feel so ill and your body wouldn’t be so badly damaged by the chemotherapy.”

This rather surprised-looking fish is a zebrafish embryo, false-coloured to give an impression of iridescence. Draycott pointed out that it was quite ironic to image a zebrafish embryo using electron microscopy because the reason the fish are so commonly used as disease models is because they’re transparent so you can see the organs forming.

The images will be on show at four science venues across the country, as well as in the window of the Wellcome Trust in London. In the meantime, here’s a few more that seem like works of abstract art, but that are actually (sometimes scarily) completely natural.