Revolutionary imaging technology creates ‘Google map’ of human body

Researchers are using a revolutionary imaging technology to create a zoomable 'Google map' of the body. The technology holds promise of becoming a game-changer for medicine, say scientists.

The previously top-secret semiconductor technology allows scientist to zoom through organs of the human body, down to the level of a single cell.

The German optical and industrial instruments maker Zeiss had originally developed the technology to scan silicon wafers for defects.

The technology is being used by University of New South Wales researchers to explore osteoporosis and osteoarthritis.

With the use of Google algorithms, professor Melissa Knothe Tate, engineer and expert in cell biology and regenerative medicine, zooms in and out from the scale of the whole joint down to the cellular level ''just as you would with Google Maps,'' cutting down the time for analyses that once took 25 years to complete to a few weeks.

Her team is also using cutting-edge microtome and MRI technology to closely observe how movement and weight-bearing affected the movement of molecules within joints, exploring the relationship between blood, bone, lymphatics and muscle.

According to Tate, for the first time researchers had the ability to go from the whole body down to how the cells were getting their nutrition and how this was all connected.

''Advanced research instrumentation provides a technological platform to answer the hardest, unanswered questions in science, opening up avenues for fundamental discoveries, the implications of which may be currently unfathomable yet which will ultimately pave the way to engineer better human health and quality of life as we age,'' professor Tate said in a statement.

Similar research is under way at universities in the US and Germany, but Tate is the first to use the system in humans.  She is presenting a number of research papers on the hip and osteoarthritis to the peer-reviewed Orthopaedic Research Society meeting in Las Vegas.

(Read more: 'Google Maps' for the body: a biomedical revolution)