by Steves morning still begins in the folding magnet of an MRI machine, since his body is scanned in a close detail from neck to knee.
Then it goes to another MRI scanner, followed by X -rays of his bones, ultrasound on the neck, blood and other samples, medical tests and questionnaires – in all five hours of his time.
A test of the patience that you would admire for every patient – only Steve is completely healthy.
He is a volunteer in the British Biobank project and gives up his time to complete the world’s largest data record for medical imaging.
His motivation: that his data can help where he cannot.
“In particular, my mother at the moment suffered from early stages of dementia, close friends have cancer.”
“Now give up my time … will help medical research in the future.”
It is even more remarkable that Steve the 100,000. The volunteer is who willingly went through the process.
Everyone allows their carefully anonymized images (that’s why we only use steves first names) as well as their biological rehearsals, medical and lifestyle stories that are available to the world’s medical researchers in the long run.
“The unprecedented selection of this imaging project – more than ten times larger than anything that previously existed – enables scientists to see disease patterns that could not be seen otherwise,” said Professor Sir Rory Collins, Managing Director of British Bioank.
“When scientists combine these pictures from different parts of the body with all the genetic and life -hail formations of our volunteers, they get a much better understanding of how our body works,” he said.
In view of the time and complexity of full -body imaging, it is a project that many scientists believed would never work.
“When we started, some people thought that we misunderstood our numbers,” said Prof. Naomi Allen, chief scientist at the British Bioank.
“Sure we wanted to scan 10,000 participants … not 100,000. And yet we are here.”
British BioKank was already a powerful resource for medical research.
Since 2003 it has been recruiting half a million people in Great Britain between the ages of 40 and 69 with the aim of following each of them when they get older.
It has long been the most comprehensive biomedical data resource in the world, which is used in more than 60 countries by at least 20,000 researchers and provides new insights into everything from Alzheimer’s and heart disease to long covid and cancer.
Adding imaging data from a fifth of these participants should make this even more useful.
“Many of the frequent diseases in the middle of late life, heart disease, dementia, cancer and Parkinson’s disease can take many years to have symptoms,” said Prof. Allen.
“These scans will be able to identify these warning flags, the early start of the disease process very early.”
If you see these changes in the scans at an early stage and are able to relate you to such a large number of people with the underlying biology and lifestyle history, this could indicate new treatments or new goals for existing treatments that could extend a healthy life.
In the decades since the study begins, researchers have already published 1,300 studies on the basis of the new data.
Nhs Memory clinics use techniques developed in the study to better diagnose dementia by MRI images.
A AI The tool developed with BioBank images of the heart is used in over 90 countries to analyze heart scans in less than a second that previously lasted 15 minutes.
And it is progress in the AI, which is expected to contain even more of the overwhelming 30 data petabytes of data in BIOBANK database and in the imaging program.
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“When we carried out a manual analysis of this data, I took about a day to measure how much fat someone had,” said Louise Thomas, professor of metabolic imaging at the University of Westminster.
“We predicted [Biobank data] Would lead us thousands of years of manual analysis. Now we use a small amount of manual analysis to train the AI models and we can analyze everything in seconds. It is quite extraordinary. “
The AI analysis is not perfect, but it has already contributed to leading Thomas’ team in order to lead the types of patients with an increased risk of men’s urysm, the relationship between fat stored in muscles, age -related muscle loss and risk of falls, and show that up to a quarter of the British population an unhealthy fat level in their liver -an unsuccessful driver of the Liver,, an unhealthy driver, That in the nerve disease, on the Liver disease, at which N -standard was burdened, at which N standard has.
With the growth and value of data records such as the British Biobank, the question of how the non -profit, open access protects the data of its volunteers, and the type of individuals and companies that can benefit from it.
According to Prof. Allen, the security of the anonymized data is constantly checked, and approved researchers are carefully checked to ensure that they are, of which they are saying they are and in public interest.
The next phase of the imaging project is already underway to scan 60,000 of the 100,000 participants at a later date in order to provide new insights into the hidden changes that our body takes through in old age.
