UK Biobank Completes 100,000-Volunteer Whole-Body Imaging Milestone

UK Biobank said it has completed scans of 100,000 participants, marking the end of an 11-year effort to create the world’s largest set of whole-body medical images. The initiative, which started in 2014, captured MRI, X-ray and ultrasound images of each volunteer’s brain, heart, blood vessels, bones and joints during five-hour appointments across four sites in England. The resulting 30-petabyte database combines the imaging with genetic, biological and lifestyle information collected from the wider half-million-person UK Biobank cohort. More than 20,000 researchers in at least 60 countries already tap the anonymised data, which has underpinned roughly 1,300 peer-reviewed papers on conditions ranging from Alzheimer’s and heart disease to cancer and liver disorders. Advances in artificial intelligence are accelerating analysis: tasks that once took a day to quantify body fat, for example, can now be completed in seconds, enabling teams to spot early signs of aneurysms, muscle loss or fatty liver. The non-profit project, backed by the Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust and other funders, charges modest fees to vetted researchers while maintaining strict data-security protocols. Organisers have begun a follow-up phase that will rescan 60,000 of the imaged volunteers to chart how organs change with age, aiming to refine early-detection tools and inform new therapies for chronic diseases.