If we fall ill and go to hospital, the doctor may advise us to take a CT scan, or extract some tissue to be examined under a microscope. CT scans and microscopes are two different modes of imaging; multiple modal imaging techniques are often used in medical and life science research.

At the recent 22nd Beijing International Biomedical Industry Development Forum, Cheng Heping, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a professor at Peking University, remarked that a multimodal trans-dimensional biomedical imaging facility has been approved and will be installed in Huairou Science City. The state-of-the-art equipment can capture images at different scales from the atomic level to the human body.

According to Cheng Heping, genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics are the "actors" of the drama of life, having to do mostly with molecules, DNA, and proteins. Audiomics show how they interact with each other and explore the essence of life and disease at a higher level, revealing both the "drama" and "stillness" of life.

Cheng mentioned that biomedical samples can be measured through interaction with light, electricity, magnetism, heat, sound, force and emission lines, so the results are presented in the form of images, such as optical microscopy and ultrasound imaging.

Different imaging modalities have their own advantages and disadvantages in terms of resolution, sensitivity and specificity. But multimodal fusion imaging possesses unique and irreplaceable advantages.

It can integrate various modalities to optimize technical performance. It can also obtain multimodal correlation information simultaneously; for instance, the transient cognitive activity of the brain must be captured simultaneously with the multimodal fusion imaging technology .

The multi-modal trans-dimensional biomedical imaging facility is a major national science and technology infrastructure project of the "13th Five-Year Plan".

The equipment covers an area of 72,000 square meters with a total investment of 1.75 billion yuan. The imaging facility includes imaging scales of over 10 orders of magnitude: human body measured by meters, laboratory mice measured by decimeters, insects measured by centimeters and millimeters, and even molecular, atomic, nano and angstrom structures, all of which can help researchers to study cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, tumors and so forth.

According to Cheng Heping, the imaging facility includes a series of cutting-edge devices, such as a high-sensitivity panoramic PET/CT, which is the world's most sensitive and fastest human body scanning equipment with the largest field of view and a shaft length of two meters.

"It is a super weapon for imaging, probably the most expensive one among all similar facilities, with a single cost of over 100 million yuan", Chen noted.

A series of industry-university-research cooperative platforms will be built, including audiomics research institutes and research hospitals. Meanwhile, engineering transformation centers will also be established in Suzhou, Shenzhen and Xi'an.