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."

Comments

Privacy concerns?

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't this be used to track people? Is this project corporately funded? Follow the money.

Colonoscopies

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yes, it goes in the blood stream

[Laughing Pigeon]

No, some liquid which shows up on X-ray is put into the artery through the catheter, the catheter does not have to be shifted up to the location of the blockage/. On the photograph one will see where it gets narrow, the black line produced by the contrast fluid gets thinner.

Re:Still untested though

[ShiningSomething]

They don't take pictures: it's an ultrasound. So it's not limited to looking around it, it can see beyond the blood vessels, in places that are hard to ultrasound from outside the body. From TFA:

Ultrasound scanners are normally used to peer into the body from the outside, in order to examine unborn babies or look for tumours, for example. Enabling these devices to penetrate deep inside the body, and to provide accurate images at this depth, is difficult because longer wavelengths are required, which dramatically reduce resolution.

So you get the ultrasound machine inside the body, right next to what you want to study. Since sonograms usually look at flows (you see heartbeats, bloddflows, etc), having input from different directions at the same time is much better than having a sequence of sonograms. So that's why it's an improvement.

Re:Still untested though

[davidfromoz]

There are devices that do this kind of thing already. They are called Intravascular Ultrasound. They are mounted on a catheter and they generate a 360 degree view. Its largely used for looking at vessel lining, though some work has been done with it in the heart chambers.

To my knowledge, which may be wrong, they do not measure flow (Doppler), it would usually not be effective since the plane of the image is perpendicular to the catheter. Since flow is normally parallel to the catheter the Doppler effect could not be used effectively. Anyway there are other catheter based devices that can measure flow I think. (the forward firing feature of this transducer might be used for Doppler measurements).

The only really interesting thing I see about this is the potential to have it no attached to the catheter. Swallowing or perhaps insertion near a site. But since this is a press release, they are only working in a glass of water and they make no statement about how to get the data out when its not attached to a catheter I'd have to say this is pie in the sky at this stage.