These GIFs Show the Freakishly High Definition Future of Body Scanning

General Electric released images on Wednesday from its first clinical trial of a next generation body scanner that captures bones, blood vessels and organs in high-definition.

The patients ride into the chamber of the scanner, dubbed "Revolution CT," where a fan-shaped beam of x rays passes down their bodies and a computer reconstructs a digital model of the body, slice-by-slice. The scanner can build an image of a heart in the time it takes for a single heartbeat, according to GE.

The snapshots below, provided by GE, may look like an artist's rendering from an anatomy textbook. In fact, they were taken from living patients at West Kendall Baptist Hospital in south Florida, the first hospital to test the new scanner in the field.

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See the Human Body Under a Microscope Adrenaline crystals (polarized light micrographs) Reprinted with permission from Science is Beautiful © 2014 by Batsford, an imprint of Pavilion Books Company Limited Adrenaline crystals (polarized light micrographs)

Reprinted with permission from Science is Beautiful © 2014 b 1 of 10

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