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New Super Scanner Can Scan Body in Under a Minute
Smivs writes to mention that a new 3D scanner, unveiled at the Radiological Society of North America, has been in use for the last month at the Metro Health medical center in Cleveland, Ohio. This new scanner allows for much more detailed scans of the entire body in just under one minute also cutting the exposure to x-rays by as much as 80%. The cost of the new tech has not yet been released.
They now use Gamma rays......
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
a lot shorter. Well, I guess the writers can come up with some other convention whereby four or more elite and highly-paid doctors can discuss a single patient ad nauseum.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Here kid, here's a quarter, get a real processor.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It would be interesting to see if this gets ported over to the entertainment industry as well. If it can do everything it claims to be able to do it would greatly help with modeling movies like "Pirates of the Caribbean" where bone structures of the actors are important.
When they figure out how to make these cheap, you can bet they'll be placing them in airports. Nothing like a full body scan to check if someone swallowed a heroin capsule or is hiding bomb making materials.
Can we say 'goodbye PET-scans'? now?
we could Super-scan body for smuggled nukes in no time !
So is this a replacement for an X-Ray machine, or for an MRI machine? It seems to give MRI like results, but the article mentions that it uses X-Rays to do it's job (where MRI's use magnets).
Is this a fancy X-Ray machine, an X-Ray machine hoping to take on some of the duties of an MRI, or an X-Ray machine that should completely replace MRIs?
I know there are some things one can find that the other can't (ignoring the obvious importance of you can't look at shrapnel in an MRI because it would be pulled out by the magnets).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Toshiba launched the same gadget - http://www.pr-inside.com/toshiba-launches-breakthrough-ct-system-r317005.htm
The most distuingishing feature of both is that they can do 256 slices, older tech could only do 64.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
http://www.google.nl/search?q=body+scan+schiphol
Slashdot has covered these before as well, with the usual privacy concerns (omg they can see my schlong size! What if somebody posts pictures of hot young women from these scan on the interwebs? *starts bodyscan pr0n site*)
I expect we'll see a lot of these new 3D scanning technologies in the next few years. Right now, the MRI and CT are the most common, and both are rather crude. MRI zaps a huge magnetic field yet still may require the ingestion of Gadolinium in order to produce enough contrast to see blood vessels, and Gadolinium has been linked to some unpleasant new diseases. X-rays are not without their risks either so I hope some better ultrasound or something comes along. I would think that before long a detailed 3D scan will be so safe and cheap that a kids toy could be produced that include it for playing doctor with your pet hamster and get a bio education in the process. Now that chemistry sets have been gutted for safety we need something to give kids that's a little more interesting...
Fabulous, now I have to pay the RIAA royalty fees on my CT Scans too? I'm not sure if my PPO is gonna cover that.
Maybe, just maybe people would travel to other states for specialist medical treatment. Nah that makes no sense at all..
Seriously though, I think this is an excellent advance, since some people really have claustrophobic problems being in those MRI scanners, and X-rays are kind of dangerous as they are currently.
Last Week the patient had lupus. All the symptoms were throwing them off because they gave them an infusion of the wrong blood type because the lupus made a different protein in the blood that made it look like an other type.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
A PET scan doesn't take structural images like a CT scan. Its strength is that it takes chemical images. You can inject a proteins containing a radioactive component (for the PET image) designed to bind to a particular set of receptors, and get an image of the location, size and behavior of the targeted cells. This CT scan will get you a great image of the heart, but the high-res scan won't show that that heart is not responding to a hormone. A PET scan remains a damaging procedure, but also remains a uniquely useful one.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
... well the important bits ... if it is female.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
now use Gamma rays......
Those make poor imaging information carriers. They scatter too much instead of undergoing photo-electric absorption. They can be used but ~100 kVp xrays or ~20 keV photons work better.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
The article makes this out to be a huge breakthrough in medical imaging, but (to use the obligatory car analogy) it's basically like announcing the 2008 Toyota Camry is a super-car; sure, it's better than the last year's model, but the improvements are incremental and other manufacturers have similar products available. More detectors, spins faster, upgrades in reconstruction software, etc are the only differences from their existing models, and other companies showed similar tech at RSNA. Don't get me wrong - the advances are useful and worthwhile, but just not the revolution TFA and summary make it out to be.
Looks like the BBC got suckered into issuing a press release for Philips...
I wonder when the cost of these scanners comes down enough that prevention-oriented HMO's can do routine scans of their patients. Their doctors do quick, cursory reviews of the most common, serious medical conditions. For example, this aneurysm sounds very serious, but easy enough to spot: http://www.or-live.com/gore/1904/
This is a CT (previously known as CAT) scanner, and it's a minor upgrade to existing technology. And, the other problem, is that this is a triumph of marketing over actual substance.
The images are no different to the images that a 2 year old CT scanner produce. The difference is the speed at which the scanner can scan: current CT scanners are able to scan 64 planes of voxels simultaneously (a slab approximately 4 cm thick), whereas this new scanner is able to scan 256 planes simultaneously (about 12 cm - it does have marginally increased resolution too). When transferred to body scanning, this means that older scanners could scan through the body at about 8 cm per second, whereas the new one could do about 24 cm/s - so you get less blurring due to breathing, etc.
The radiation dose reduction isn't really as spectacular as claimed either. The dose reduction is quoted for cardiac scans - the problem with scanning the heart is that it moves. The trick with cardiac scans is to only use the data from when the heart is still between beats to produce the images (otherwise they will be hopelessly blurred) - on previous generation scanners, this was done by scanning continuously while recording an ECG trace. Data from when the ECG suggests the heart was in motion, was then not used for image generation. This meant unnecessary radiation exposure to capture data that was just going to be discarded. In the case of a 64 'slice' 4 cm scanner, this meant potentially scanning each part of the heart 4 or 5 times, to ensure you got enough good data to get pictures.
Later versions of scanner hardware/firmware are able to analyse the ECG on the fly and only capture the data that was absolutely required. By contrast, the 256 slice scanner does it the brute force and ignorance method, the scanner's coverage is essentially large enough to scan the entire heart in one go in the space between 2 beats. The 64 slice scanners with the latest cardiac hardware/firmware have already quoted 80% radiation dose reduction over the previous versions - so, given that the price for the additional 192 'slices' is unlikely to be less that $400k, the value for money is unlikely to be spectacular.
I just got this in my inbox yesterday:
(blatantly ripped from http://futurefeedforward.com/front.php?fid=104 )
Google Body: Users Find Asses with Both Hands
August 18, 2022
MOUNTAIN VIEW--Information search giant Google, Inc. announced Thursday the release of Google Body, a search service aiming to index the internal and external anatomy of every living creature on the planet. "Google has long been dedicated to making information both useful and universally accessible," notes Google VP of Product Development Eric Hind. "We're happy now to extend search to information about human bodies, mine and yours, inside and out, from the number of follicles on my head to the length of the President's toenails."
The project, known as Google Body, sees the company partnering with public transportation systems, libraries, and motor vehicle departments to place scanning equipment in high-traffic doorways and public thoroughfares. Though details of the agreements are scarce and reportedly subject participating city and state officials to strict non-disclosure terms, Google's announcement confirmed that the project is active in several major U.S. population centers, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City, with agreements with at least 16 other cities in late-stage negotiation. "We've passed proof-of-concept at this point," adds Hind, "and now our focus is scalability and rolling this thing out nationwide."
The service, which has been available for some three months to invitation-only beta testers, enables users to search for aggregate information about the anatomy of user-defined groups. "The service is a boon to the medical research community," says Dr. Jennifer Guns of the Johns Hopkins Clinic for Specialism. "Nothing will replace truly controlled trials, but the ability to get a snapshot of, say, the blood pressure of men between 50 and 65 on New York's Upper East Side, can certainly give companies an idea of where they might best spend their research dollars."
Early testers have remarked upon a fuzzy-logic "match my organ" feature, which helps users get in touch with the nearest, most suitable donor for multiple organ systems. "We think of Body as way to bring people together," remarks Google's Hind. The most common searches among testers, however, exploited the service's ability to produce three-dimensional images of the bodies of individual subjects. "I was shocked when I saw it," exclaims Larry Blender of Carson City. "I mean, one, where did they get a 3-D rendering of my ass, and, two, does my ass really look like that? I admit that I satisfied some of my curiosity about a few of my neighbors and co-workers before I thought to search for myself, but I was still really shocked to see it up there."
The service has understandably raised concerns among privacy activists, who point to reports that early users include some well-known insurance companies and two prominent executive recruiting firms. "You know what the top two search terms are, after 'ass'?" asks David Deerfield of People and Privacy, a privacy-focused community outreach group. "They're 'aorta' and 'arterial plaque.' Who do you think is conducting those searches? There's no doubt in my mind that there are insurance company bots scouring this thing and we think it should stop."
Responding to criticism from privacy groups, Google's Hind pointed to the program's opt-out policy. "We are very concerned about user privacy, and that's why we will not make publicly available any information about anybody who let's us know they do not want to participate by wearing an Opt-Out headband when in public. Google archives information about those individuals, but does not make it searchable." The yellow and black vinyl headbands can be requested free of charge by writing to the company at its Mountain View headquarters.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
TFA doesn't mention it, but if you were older you'd probably realize this is a big deal. Maybe not this particular machine, but the general approach.
What this replaces is not an MRI or a CAT scan, but an angiogram. That's the nasty procedure where they inject dye into your coronary arteries through a catheter threaded up through your femoral artery while they image your heart, so they can see whether you have CAD (coronary artery disease, where the arteries supplying the heart are narrowed or blocked, the immediate precursor to a heart attack). This is an unpleasant experience, to say the least. It's also expensive, since it requires a skilled operator to thread the catheter up to your heart. Then there's the possibility of complications, from infection at the site where your artery got punctured to the formation of micro-clots from damage to the artery walls that might cause a heart attack, or stroke.
These newfangled detectors promise to be able to image the heart in such exquisite 3D detail that your cardiologist can basically just look at your heart and see whether you have CAD, and how far along it is. And all you need to do is lie on the X-ray table for a few minutes. No dye, no catheters, no expensive trained personnel, zero risk of complications, far lower cost, and a much briefer time in the hospital.
The other important news here is the lower X-ray exposure. Existing machines that can do this kind of imaging of the heart have given you such a blast of X-rays that they don't justify the increased risk of e.g. cancer unless you are already seen as fairly high-risk for CAD. When they get the X-ray exposure down, it will become possible to screen lower-risk people for CAD, perhaps even the general public.
Right now, all we can do to screen the general populace for CAD is monitor iffy surrogate measures, like your lipid profile (your "cholesterol"), your family history, your weight, et cetera. On the basis of these measures we prescribe many $billions of drugs (e.g. Lipitor) and further, more invasive testing.
But we know these surrogate measures are only somewhat and very generally correlated with CAD. How much better it would be if we could easily and cheaply monitor not the possible precursors to CAD but CAD itself -- the actual narrowing of the coronary arteries. It could be a public-health breakthrough. Plenty of people have CAD without having the classic warning signs (especially women), and plenty of people with sky-high cholesterol et cetera have no CAD at all. It's worth remembering that even in these modern times, the first symptom of coronary heart disease in some 30% of cases is a fatal heart attack.
Prevention oriented- so far as spotting conditions or so far as refusing new insurees?
not to be all 1984 or gattagaesque- but imagine if they built one in at human resources...
quick scan-- nope- no insurance for your (mysterious lump filled) ass...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Toshiba has been running 320 slice CT scans for some time now. See here and here. The 256-slice version of the scanner has been running for atleast 6 months now. See here
The F-ray!
So apparently Ariel too has a Cleveland, Ohio?
I heard about this technology being used in an American emergency room TWO YEARS AGO. Maybe not exactly this. Maybe it was ten minutes instead of one minute. But still, why aren't machines like this in more widespread use yet?
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
then why is it on slashdot?
Actually I read about newer X-ray machines a few months ago. The point was that matter changed the PHASE of the X-rays - this allowed for much more precision than traditional X-Ray machines.
So in Canada and other socialized-medicine countries, it'll be 3-9 months on the waiting list for a 1-minute scan.
Elsewhere, people will not be able to afford the scan at
all and will have to make do with their Dad shining a
torch up their arse. Except the super-rich.
so all the actors would have to lay down to get scanned i think.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
n/t
When people were raving about full body scans, they'd look at the tiniest little blot on the image and go paranoid thinking its cancer. As Dr. House says, "it can find a problem in anybody."
Still, I wonder if this thing can export the images into a common 3d app file for use in Maya, Softimage, or 3dsMax?
80% of a massively insane amount of radiation is still too much.
Cool yes, but it's still down a bad path.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
okay.. now you don't have to bother about wild imagination of your favourite actress without clothes... just scan...
Something this important has 107 posts.
One hundred and seven posts.
If Microsoft or Linux or Apple had been mentioned in the title or article there would have been 700 and most of them would be:
Windows..."something or other"
Mac..."We'd do it better"
Linux..."LINUX!!!!!"
Instead we get a bunch of jokes. Hey tech guys, what are you going to do when the doctors are gone? I see a nerd with a gangrene leg and 20 of you arguing over what to do while...you figure it out.
This Philips scanner is really just an incremental change from previous machines. 64 and 128 slice machine have been out for a while. Moving to 256 is a standard incremental upgrade. It provides no new information over previous generations of CT scanners. Its just faster.
The big push in 3D X-ray imaging is to record the tissue's response to across a range of x-ray energies. In its simplest form this can be done with Siemens dual energy CT scanner. In the more advanced forms its done using energy selective X-ray detectors. The analogy for visible light is to move from black and white photography to colour photography. Examples of energy selective detectors include CERN's Medipix detector.
This energy informationn is known to be useful for vascular studies (eg. dual energy angiography) and improved soft tissue contrast. Energy resolving X-ray imaging make CT closer to MRI in the information it provides.
Whilst this scanner does have advantages over previous systems, it is an advance on previous CT (aka CaT) scanners, rather than something entirely new. From the couple of actual facts that sneak into the story, this is a 256 'slice' scanner, compared to previously available 64 slice systems. This means that for each rotation of the x-ray tube round the patient, 256 simultaneous sets of density measurements are made. The total detector length will be in the region of 128 to 160 mm, rather than 40 mm previously. Not knowing the intimate details of this precise scanner, I would guess that the claimed 80% dose reduction is in very limited circumstances compared to previous CTs - probably cardiac scanning, where the scan can be performed 'prospectively' rather than 'retrospectively' gated (in other words, the x-ray beam is only on during for a fraction of a cardiac beat, rather than multiple beats as before). The other benefit seems to be the 0.27 second gantry rotation time, which is an improvement on the ~ 0.3 second rotation time before. So overall a series of (impressive) developments, but not a totally new scanner. Toshiba also have a similar 320 slice system at this years' RSNA BTW, IAACTP (I am a CT physicist)
From my post elsewhere in this article...
The next big leap in X-ray imaging is likely to be X-ray spectography.
This Philips scanner is really just an incremental change from previous machines. 64 and 128 slice machine have been out for a while. Moving to 256 is a standard incremental upgrade. It provides no new information over previous multislice CT scanners. Its just faster.
The big push in 3D X-ray imaging is to record the tissue's response to across a range of x-ray energies. In its simplest form this can be done with Siemens dual energy CT scanner. In the more advanced forms its done using energy selective X-ray detectors. The analogy for visible light is to move from black and white photography to colour photography. Examples of energy selective detectors include CERN's Medipix detector. [wikipedia.org]
This energy informationn is known to be useful for vascular studies (eg. dual energy angiography) and improved soft tissue contrast. Energy resolving X-ray imaging allow CT scanner to provide information closer to what MRI can do, but the speed and spatial resolution of X-ray.
Have you ever driven down the 405 in Long Beach - Stinks and has miles of refineries. Louisiana has even more.
..........FULL STOP.