World’s Biggest Medical Imaging Project Reaches Major Target

The impact of advances in medical imaging technology, particularly in the wake of machine learning and increased training data, is found both in individual diagnoses as well as wider trends in health, medicine and an understanding of how the human body changes as it ages.

The single biggest medical imaging project in the world, the UK Biobank, has completed its goal of scanning the whole bodies of 100,000 volunteers, with an impact that has already been felt throughout the medical world.

Taking place over the course of a decade, the UK Biobank involved the collection of an extensive corpus of MRI scans, with 12,000 scans being undertaken in each five-hour session with every person.

The project took ten years to complete, with a second phase following up on 60,000 participants set to continue until 2029.

This information has become extremely vital training data for medical scanners, allowing for dedicated diagnostic tools powered by machine learning to provide more accurate, faster diagnoses, particularly of complex and difficult-to-detect diseases.

For example, the UK Biobank has already allowed for dementia to be more accurately diagnosed, something that can potentially prolong and save lives as more rapid interventions lead to more positive prognoses.

Another result of the project was a tool that can scan the heart in less than a second, compared to a 15-minute scan that was more common prior to the UK Biobank project. This tool can help find potential warning signs of heart disease, further preventing premature death.

In the future, the Biobank could replace a biopsy scan to diagnose fatty liver disease with an MRI scan, which could avoid it progressing into potentially life-threatening conditions such as cirrhosis.

It also helps to illuminate certain variables that affect how people remain healthy as they age, including predicting the early onset of disease, how alcohol consumption affects the brain and how people store fat in different ways, leading to different risks of disease.

These insights, as well as countless others made possible with the anonymised database of information, have already saved lives and will have a progressively larger impact going forward.