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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.
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.
A CT scan (cat scan) is basically an X-ray machine that can yield 3D images just like an MRI. But CT is better at imaging bone and doing angiography. MRI's excel at soft tissue and make "movies" of things like a beating heart. MRI's are basically programmable and can do all kinds of things as a result.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
If I wasn't at work right now, I'd so be googling "bodyscan porn" right now so I could be...googling bodyscan porn. Well, that takes care of my plans for the night.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Bearded Dragon
It's not a replacement for a CT scanner, it *IS* a CT scanner. The synopsis, as well as the article itself, is very vague and misleading. This isn't some brand new technology, it's technology that is and has been continually advancing since the 70's. I work with a 16 slice scanner in a hospital and it can do all of the 3d reconstructions like in this article, just takes longer to acquire the data from the patient.
To vacillate or not to vacillate, that is the question... or is it?
It's a CT scanner.
In other words, the technology is X-ray, but it electronically combines many images from many angles to build up a 3D image of what's inside the patient.
By the way, CT scans and MRIs are somewhat complementary to each other. Which one is "better" depends on what you are looking for:
CT uses X-rays, which I beleive (to my limited understanding) essentially measure density. Denser matter stops more X-rays, less dense matter lets more through.
MRI on the other hand uses magnetic resonance, which senses water concentration by alligning the magnetic dipole moments of water neuclei, and then "pinging" them and watching them resonate. Water concentration in the wrong place can indicate ruptured cell walls found in tumors, for example. Depending on exactly what you're hoping to spot, one may be better technology than the other.
(Disclaimer, I am not a doctor. Just someone with too many friends and relatives with cancer, unfortunately).
I'm a medical physicist, so I do know my share about CT (and other medical imaging) - I guess you could say I'm "in the business." And yes, the trend of adding more slices has been going on for years, and yes, it is good, but in my opinion more slices does not make this a "super-scanner" that is going to change medicine as we know it as TFA and summary imply.
To beat the dead horse of the car analogy, it's like this year's model gets a few more mpg than last year's (and maybe a TV in the seat, just for the "cool" factor of having a 256 slice CT)... A practical improvement that is good for everybody concerned, but not revolutionary.
Also, in another post you mention new car models as marketing hype - medical devices are a BIG business, and have a huge marketing machine. RSNA (mentioned in the article and summary) is the biggest trade show for medical devices in the country (possibly the world) - there are huge booths, displays, free swag, etc, and glitz definitely comes into play there. I wasn't at RSNA this year (last time was 2005), but I wouldn't be at all surprised if Philips had a display model of this unit on a rotating platform, a la a car show. The article sound eerily similar to the Philips press release (found here:http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/index.jsp?epi_menuItemID=887566059a3aedb6efaaa9e27a808a0c&ndmViewId=news_view&ndmConfigId=1000052&newsId=20071125005033&newsLang=en).
I'm fully aware of the importance of developing better CT imaging, but this isn't really a huge improvement over existing 64-slice CT scanners. As another poster pointed out, CT angiography has been around awhile and Toshiba already has a production 256-slice unit. The dose given is incrementally lower, which is a good thing, but not nearly enough to make CT screening for cardiac disease commonplace. When it comes to CT, novel sampling and reconstruction algorithms are as important on the dose reduction front IMO.
Heh, ouch... don't know where you got that from my post (I said in my OP "Don't get me wrong - the advances are useful and worthwhile, but just not the revolution TFA and summary make it out to be.")
A cheap, low/no-dose, fast, and effective means to screen for cardiac disease would be a public-health breakthrough - this machine ain't it (which you have said yourself).
By the way, I stand behind everything in my OP, and fail to see how I am "totally wrong" as the subject of your reply suggests.