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A Panoramic View of Your Insides
deepcleanfun writes "Researchers from New Mexico and Taiwan have invented a tiny probe — about the size of a rice grain — equipped with an ultrasound scanner that can travel through veins and arteries, taking ultrasound images of its surroundings. Unlike previous probes that travel through the body, which provide a view from only one direction at a time, the new device has seven imagers integrated onto the hexagonal prism that can see nearly everywhere at once."
Apparently they haven't even gotten around to testing it on animals yet. But they say it works great in a glass of water. The news might be a bit premature.
No nice pics either.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Origami is the art of making figures by folding paper. They seem to have fabricated the sonar emitters in a flat piece and folded it into a hexagon. That seems to be the key to get multiple views.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Without pics you weren't IN my insides!
Isn't having solid stuff in your bloodstream bad?
it could be a Fantastic Voyage.
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So doctors will now be able to see in 3D that the arterial blockage that killed the patient is the little probe they sent in to find a suspected arterial blockage?
Cool tech and all, but how do they control where it goes?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
...has generously offered to pilot the device.
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
Couldn't this be used to track people? Is this project corporately funded? Follow the money.
You don't need one of these for Goatse.....
Layne
Some people make tiny rice-sized probes to look at someone's insides while others simply go the Goatse route...
This guy's the limit!
Without having read TFA (hey, this is slashdot) I assume this is for passing through a person's digestive system and not their bloodstream because getting a something the size of a piece of rice caught in the right place is like having a stroke, a heart attack, or other unhappy circulatory problems; and since I doubt it carries enough power to navigate it'd be pretty tough to keep it out of vital organs.
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I interviewed with a doctor at Northwestern University Hospital in 1989 or so for an ultrasonic catheter to look at plaques/heart valves and such. There was come California based company who had the hardware, but not mush software, hence my interview.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
For those of you of colonoscopy age... I asked my doctor if he could do my last two colonoscopies using only the pain-killer fentanyl, and omitting Versed (midolazam). The latter is a sedative and muscle-relaxant, but it induces drowsiness and often produces retrograde amnesia, i.e. you are conscious and awake but afterwards don't remember what happened.
I'm glad I did. I did not experience any serious pain; at two points, presumably when going around corners, I felt something like a bad gas pain lasting only a couple of seconds. I found it fascinating seeing what the inside of my gut looked like, very different from what I expected, and very reminiscent of "Fantastic Voyage" for those who remember that film.
They had two flat TV monitors suspended from the ceiling, one for the doctor and one for the nurse, and it was very easy for the patient (me) to watch as well. The images were much sharper and detailed than I expected.
It's something to consider, assuming you're not creeped out by the very idea of the colonoscopy in itself.
People... the only thing that is different about this than other instruments already in use today is that it can view in more than one direction simultaneously. How do you think an angiogram is performed? They stick the think in through the artery in your leg, and fish it up to the spot where the blockage is. Sure, it sounds scary, but it's done every day. I think this is a great improvement to help doctors.
What sort of rice is one millimeter across and one millimeter long? Something got lost when going from Imperial to Metric...
Is this not what an aneurysm is? I can see it now. We appear to be loosing signal; it has gone to far we can not stop the sensor. Patient colapses.
...but I found some here: http://goatse.cz/
Angioplasty is where they stick things in your veins in order to sort them out.
A colleague of mine had a heart problem with a thin wall between two of the chambers causing oxygenated and de-oxygenated blood to mix. These things aren't uncommon and many people live with it without problem. However this guy is a scuba diver, and these heart problems can be dangerous. His doctor said 'stop diving'.
He called for a second opinion, and discovered that they can stick a cylindrical probe up your femoral artery, navigate it into your heart and expand it flat onto the heart wall, then the heart muscle will grow around it, sealing the hole. So he went through with the procedure, purely so he could carry on scuba diving, which he now does pretty much every weekend, and from seeing his photographs I can understand why (and I wish I lived somewhere I could go diving every weekend in clear water without a dry suit).
---begin sarcastic comment---
Isn't there someone that holds the "Origami Hexagon Fold" Patent that is going to sue them?
How about someone holding the "Using waves to view internal organs in a human body" Patent?
Or maybe the "Etching of ultrasound emitting device on silicon wafers" patent?
---end sarcastic comment---
Seriously,
if this invention grows to be used in humans, it will really provide some serious insights on disease prevention and diagnosis. I just hope that the patent morons don't destroy another inventive design much like they did with poor Vonage.
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx
This thread is useless without pics.
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Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) has been around for a while. You enter the arterial system via the femoral artery in the groin, and direct your catheter around the vascular tree using fluoroscopy (x-rays). A circumferential ultrasound transducer on the end of a catheter gives you a 360 degree view around the vessel. (Looks just like the view you get with the endorectal probe they use to image the prostate, just a lot smaller.) The advantage of this new catheter seems to be that it can look in front as well as circumferentially.
These are mostly used by cardiologists in the heart, although interventional radiologists can use them as well. (I'm a radiologist, although I haven't had the chance to use one of these yet.)
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IVUS) actually has a pretty good review of the technology. Boston Scientific's web site hawks their catheters in the "Interventional Cardiology" section.
Yes, they're lame. But they're expected. The headline demands a goatse reference, just as much as mentioning anything related to a line in a Monty Python skit (or Simpsons, Futurama, etc), demands that someone uncreatively post a transcript and score automatic funny mods.
get it out? obviously this thing can't be left to run wild or else it will just plug an artery... do they leave a little string attached?
The porn industry has been doing this kind of stuff for years.
.. used on Uranus :)?
Can't resist.
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Go looking for all that gum I swallowed when I was a kid.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's kind of an "inside scan sonar!"
Thank you, thank you... I'm here all week... Be sure to try out the buffet!
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I'm not of colonoscopy age yet (and am hoping by the time I am they can do it non invasively!) But I have to say that taking a drug that would cause me to not remember the experience would sound like a good thing to me, if it is as unpleasant as I understand it to be!
YES that thing can do nice US and/or Doppler pictures from the other side of the skull (from inside, were the interesting blood vessels are).
The question that I ask is :
How are you going to avoid it clogging terminal arteries ?
They speak about injecting it to analyse the blood vessels in the brain. The problem is that, higher than the base of the skull the arteries are of the terminal type (ie.: every artery only leads to smaller vessels that feed the brain cells. no artery is inter-connected with other arteries. There's no more redundancy past the base of the skull). Thus if the thing gets stuck (and it will because the vessels are getting progressively smaller until they reach the size of a red cell), everything downstream on the vessel will be cut out from blood supplies.
What's their plan ? Attaching it at the tip of a catheter ?
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Diarrhea in Cinerama
isn't there a risk that this thing might block an artery? and paralyze or kill you?