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A High-Res 3D Video of the Embryonic Heartbeat
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Houston, TX, adapted an imaging technique called optical coherence tomography to capture 3D video of the mammalian heart as it forms. They used the method to image a mouse embryo just 8.5 days past conception and about a day after it starts to form. In the remarkable video a normal heartbeat is visible. Normally optical coherence tomography is used for clinical imaging of the retina. Having such a high-resolution, non-invasive way to image the developing heart could perhaps help doctors treat congenital heart disorders in human babies."
Impressive for noninvasive imagery. It'll probably end up having all sorts of high-end surgical uses.
The only real problem(beyond the usual high start up costs of new technology) will be the inevitable co-opting of this imagery for a new round of weepy anti-abortion ads. "Oh Noes!, Lookat the wittle heart..."
Hijacked by anti-abortion kooks in 3... 2... 1...
This is a grainy 2D film, not a high res 3D film!
A mouse at 8.5 days out of a 19-21 day gestational cycle is about equal to a human at 3-4 months (out of 9 months). I'm not sure but I doubt physicians would be willing to operate on an unborn 3-4 month (12-16 week) old human. However there seems to be a presumption that one would want to invest such time and expense in that potential individual to repair such a congenital defect when it is accepted (at least by my myself) that it might be better to simply abort such a potentially problem prone potential individual and start over.
It is worth noting that 60-70% of conceptions end in "natural" terminations (presumably due to a self-error detection and correction process). Most likely heart defects may make it past or around such self-regulatory screening processes.
And yes, for the anti-abortion readers, I'm a cold heartless SOB who will take any "MOD -" points and stick them in the cookie jar on my desk -- and -- FYI, you most probably have no idea what is coming and I am simply going to sit back behind my cookie jar and chuckle when it gets here. For the people who don't know what this really means there are tools that might help called Google and Wikipedia.
You can get arbitrarily good images of fixed (dead) embryos, but live imaging using any method is damn tough, and live 3D imaging at this resolution is, as far as I know, unprecedented. Motion makes it nearly impossible to do MR or CT 3D imaging. You can gate against the cardiac cycle to image a single animal, but nobody can yet gate against a fetal heartbeat in a mouse. I'm not even sure if that would be enough, because the maternal heartbeat contributes significant motion, too.
One of our doctoral students did a 3D atlas of the embryonic mouse using MR microscopy. These were fixed specimens, but they're isotropic (the same spatial resolution in all three dimensions), and nobody's come close to matching our resolution as far as I know. Part of her work was looking at cardiac septal defects, which you pretty much have to study in embryos, because they aren't compatible with live birth.
One drawback of OCT is that it fails if you have to go through much tissue. Mice are tiny enough to make this work possible, but I don't think there's any way you could do it in humans, short of inserting a source/detector into the uterus, which kind of spoils the whole "non-invasive" feature.
and 3d has nothing to do with it
That will solve the problem. Anyone who disagrees with me is a heterosexual straight person who likes dick in pussy fucking.
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And yes, for the anti-abortion readers
Oh, the great irony of politics is that Darwin is firmly on the right wing side. In the end, the earth belongs to those who have the most babies, and, all those things you advocate, undermine your own culture as much as they undermine your genes. A quick spin of the globe shows that religious societies are the ones producing the most children - and secular societies the least. You can condemn Islam's male domination, or the quaint traditions of American Christianity, but, the fact is, they are the ones having the babies while secular people are not.
So sure, please, believe it: marriage and having a person stay at home is quaint.... if you get your girlfriend pregnant, its better to get rid of the child than to ruin your lives, believe all of it. If we can then privatize schools and do the other things so that your input to our culture can be blocked, we can exterminate liberalism all the more quickly, simply by out-breeding it. But, at the end of the day, your way of life is doomed, simply because, for better or for worse, our religious culture has been evolved by hundreds of generations of human cultural evolution, and your culture will fall by the wayside as much as your genes will perish forever in the dust.
This is my sig.
From the camera manufacturers' site:
In other words, if you hok up a RED ONE camera to a laprascope, the very best you'll see in real time is 1280x720p, which is pretty crappy - even consumer-grade camcorders can do that.
Call us back in a decade when they really can do 4k surgery.
This story got it so wrong (so what else is new) ...
I'm sorry but how does "3d has nothing to do with it" mean anything. The title of the story is that it is in 3d, so I'd say it's pretty relevant no matter how you cut it.
... but this is stereo(-2D), not (volumetric) 3D. Despite the layman definition.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I'm no expert so, please don't take my word for it but...
Don't mice have a gestation of around 21 days like Hamsters?
I mean, "just 8.5" days sounds spectacular but, scaled to the 21 days they usually take to be born, I'd say it's quite long.
I have no idea how hard it is to film a human embryo at around 3.5~4 months, though. Nor if it's at all related to the scale in time.
I want to build a pyramid. Does anyone here have any Jews for sale?
This kind of evidence hopefully makes it clearer that the beat you are seeing is a human being and the only thing that separates it from a newborn is time and food. The baby's hair color, eye color, etc... are already there, they just haven't had enough time to be expressed.
Unless this video comes with some 3D glasses and I missed out on them, this is 2D. The image has height and width, but I can't rotate it around to see the heartbeat from the side or the back or the top or the bottom.
There are many medical imaging applications which could improve diagnosis without subjecting patients to ionizing radiation, yet very little if any R&D dollars are invested to productize them given that all the major medical imaging vendors are heavily invested in 'big iron' solutions such as CT and digital XRay. As long the current ecosystem is in place these companies will push their multimillion dollar imaging systems while throwing in Ultrasound and laproscopy systems merely to sweeten the deal. This is one area where eastern countries are way ahead of the west in that care providers seek imaging solutions based on utility, not on the reimbursement rates per procedure.
TFA has a Low res grainy 2D video, and the author readily admits: "Though it looks grainy, this and other video of the developing heart made by the Houston group are some of the best ever taken."
I think, and probably, it is very impressive to make a videothe beating hart of a tiny mouse embryo, even if it is grainy and 2D.
BUT WHERE THE HELL is the H.D. 3D video announced in the headline?
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I haven't conclusively figured out where to put the boundaries for individual rights. Anyone who thinks these issues are simple is either naive or a genius on a level I'll never be able to reach. Morality in the real world is messy and arbitrary for everyone who hasn't locked himself into a moral system prescribed by an omnipotent, omniscient deity.
Morality hinges on human experience. It is not a mathematical problem, and approaching it as if it were only overcomplicates an otherwise, often simple, problem.
Most of Judeo-Christian morality can be deduced by simply paying attention to the plight of others. What is seemingly arbitrary is often the result of our collective experience.
As an example, I'll use homosexuality. According to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, it's wrong. But why?
I honestly didn't know the answer. Why would God care if someone found sexual pleasure in a unique way? He wants us to be happy, right?
I didn't find out until after I had married and had a child. I remember an experience, my son and I in the kitchen, eating breakfast. He spontaneously bursts out, "Daddy and me! Daddy and me! Daddy and me!". In that moment I looked at a person who was a part of the same flesh and blood as my wife and I and it filled me with indescribable joy. I had *no idea* being a father could be so rewarding.
But most homosexuals will never experience this joy, let alone know it exists. Sure, I could describe it a million times, but I remember what it was like when I was single. I really couldn't grasp sex as anything more than an intensely physical pleasure, and the sarcastic rejoinder, "yeah, better than sex" made sense to me. Now it just sounds stupid, as if the person saying it is trying to tell the world how immature and petty they really are. But in having children I discovered that God wants us not merely to enjoy sex, but to have the whole package - marriage and children as well!
And yet, you will find people who have never had children despise the notion of having them. They simply cannot understand - as I did not, prior to having children - the joy of having children. In a similar manner, someone afflicted with homosexual desires, often simply can't understand why they would resist temptation. The first time I met a homosexual, it was immediately apparent to me that they were undergoing an epic internal struggle, the least of which concerned their sexuality. Yet, to them, this condition has persisted for so long it felt "normal" And without the ability to defer judgment to another's experience, they saw no reason to change. Without any understanding that things could be better, they thought of my position as merely trying to take away what little happiness they did posses. (As if I woke up in the morning and said, "Who can I hate today!?")
Most objections to Judeo-Christian morality are rooted in two causes:
The first is almost never philosophical. The second is almost invariably philosophical, but dwells on matters in which the philosopher has no actual experience. Having actually seen someone die unexpectedly, it is very clear to me that all human life is valued by God. Until that happened, the abortion issue for me had been largely a philosophical exercise. It wasn't until I witnessed the death of a human being that my mind changed dramatically. But I realize that most reading this have not had that experience.
In fact, most of us will never have all of the experiences which shaped the Torah or the Bible. We simply have to trust that these tenets of morality were written down and copied throughout the ages because enough people recognized the value and truth in them. But how can we as a society trust the experience of others, when we are so arrogant that we think we already know everything?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Who cares about a heart beat when the embryo's circulation is directly linked to that of the mother? On the contrary, the nervous system is formed in humans within three days, before any woman would even notice being pregnant. In fact, the ectodermal cells that are the undifferentiated neurons destined to become the nervous system are in place and begin their morphological formation before implantation into the uterine wall.
Fetal and maternal circulation are independent and separated by the chorion. The ectoderm also gives rise to the epidermis, and nobody thinks that's special. Neurulation begins around day 19 with the formation of the neural plate. It takes months for this to develop into a distinctively human nervous system.
As someone who has lost a child to one of the worst heart defects out there (Hypoplastic left heart) I consider this to be wonderful. I am hoping that HLHS will be truly curable in 10 or 15 years. Now it is sort of curable for many, but not all. Forgive me for being negative after losing a child.
As a pro-lifer, please stop the flame war. You are making us look stupid. While I do not believe in abortion, there are cases it is understable, such as in the most hopeless cases of HLHS. My son died so quickly that it does not seem any surgery could have fixed it. Nobody is truly pro-abortion. We only differ on when abortion is acceptable.
Limbo isn't a place of suffering in Catholic dogma. In fact, it's a place of peace and contentment. It's just not as good as being in Heaven with God. It's Purgatory that's "Hell Lite" (for lack of a better term). In Purgatory, you work off your sin through suffering, in order to get to Heaven. The concept of Purgatory lead to the concept of indulgences, which lead to Martin Luther's 95 Theses, and thus to the Protestant Reformation. So all in all, Purgatory solved a problem for the Church (insofar as it allowed soldiers to engage in brutal combat but still get a shot at salvation if they died), but caused a much larger problem in that it was ripe for abuse.
Oops! I accidentally fell into this naked chick... Over and over and over...
If you truly are interested, then do your own research. The point being made by abortion-opponents (a majority in this country, BTW), is that they are being unfairly vilified. Whereas terrorist acts by fanatics of other religion(s) (and they too have plenty of little-reported failures) are immediately followed by calls to not consider all adherents of the religion terrorists, the anti-abortion Christians are never defended in this manner. Worse — as this very thread has shown — they are being openly accused of sharing each terrorist's views and thus their guilt.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Or, as Planned Parenthood would say -muscular contractions in non-viable, pre-human flesh packets?