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First-Ever Color X-ray on a Human (home.cern)
What if, instead of a black and white X-ray picture, a doctor of a cancer patient had access to color images identifying the tissues being scanned? From a post: This is now a reality, thanks to a New-Zealand company that scanned, for the first time, a human body using a breakthrough color medical scanner based on the Medipix3 technology developed at CERN. Father and son scientists Professors Phil and Anthony Butler from Canterbury and Otago Universities spent a decade building and refining their product. Medipix is a family of read-out chips for particle imaging and detection. The original concept of Medipix is that it works like a camera, detecting and counting each individual particle hitting the pixels when its electronic shutter is open. This enables high-resolution, high-contrast, very reliable images, making it unique for imaging applications in particular in the medical field. Hybrid pixel-detector technology was initially developed to address the needs of particle tracking at the Large Hadron Collider, and successive generations of Medipix chips have demonstrated over 20 years the great potential of the technology outside of high-energy physics.
Looks like they would need software to focus on different depths/cross sections - but the picture does look pretty cool. I doubt this will completely replace the tradition x-ray though where you can see everything in one picture in one go.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
They should be able to make this a 3D color X-ray by using two or more exposures at different power settings. There are applications that such a thing would be superior to MRI.
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/...
nothing to see here - move along
Oh, wait, ... yeah, got it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
OK, these are cool images. However, I do think this is a bit biased toward the marketing-friendly description on the product page (marsbioimaging.com).
First, calling this a "color" image is not correct. Just as with radar, sonar, MRI, or anything else that captures non-visible light, what we are seeing is "false color". The distinction is that someone mapped signal values to colors, and that implies that those nice pics probably had some human input to make appropriate color choices (and not blue flesh, red bones, or whatever).
Second, this is not the first spectral CT, as the article seems to imply. Check out for example https://www.itnonline.com/article/spectral-imaging-brings-new-light-ct for a summary of what commercial offerings were available 3 years ago.
Don't get me wrong, it sounds like great stuff -- but there seems to be significant hype here, too.
Wait, the LHC? Isn't that where Mr. Higgs Boson invented the black hole? I don't want to go in for an x-ray and end up destroying the world with a black hole!!! Bad invention. way too dangerous!!
Many machines at CERN. New machines...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
How is this different from false color generation based on tissue density? Do different tissues fluoresce (different wavelength out than the one coming in) and this thing detects the spectrum of the fluorescence and assigns colors on the display accordingly?
The device doesn't actually measure the color of light the tissue reflects (can't due to no light reaching some of these tissues). It determines what type of tissue it is, then colors it in the images based on what we know the color of that type of tissue to be. Like adding color to old black and white movies based on our best estimate of skin tones, grass, roads, etc.
Serious question.... Last time I checked, absent any visible light source, nothing has any visible color. Or are they going to shine a *really* bright light on a person and exploit any translucency their skin and organs might have to image them in color?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Aren't x-rays x-ray colored?
Hopefully it won't be too long before we see an upgrade to the old x-ray specs that were available at the back of Boys' Life magazine.
It is false-colour not real colour imaging. The colours are based on density, not the true colour.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Serious question.... Last time I checked, absent any visible light source, nothing has any visible color. Or are they going to shine a *really* bright light on a person and exploit any translucency their skin and organs might have to image them in color?
To answer the general question, you could easily shift (and, if necessary, compress) the wavelengths of the X-rays back to the visible spectrum. That probably isn't the best strategy for creating a useful image, so it wouldn't be what this specific device is doing. I would imagine you would get a more useful image if you map specific X-ray wavelengths to specific colors, so that you get the desired color contrast (e.g. between muscle tissue and other organ tissues).
Which means that it's not a color x-ray, it's an x ray that has been artificially colored. You can do the same thing with a regular x ray and a box of crayola crayons. The only difference is that it's being done automatically by software.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Lots of color-blind x-ray specialists will get fired soon.
My first thought when reading TFS was an image colored in various shades of red. Joking aside, I'm excited about breakthroughs in medical imaging that allow more nuanced learning about what's going on inside a living person.
Simpsons did it.
Nice to see the announcement of a color x-ray.
But, knowing how much normal x-rays, 3D mammograms, CAT, NMRs and other 30+ year old technologies still cost, I doubt that many folks in the sub $250K/yr category will be able to afford a color x-ray, much less a color x-ray movie in 3D, if the technology advances in a timely manner. Many hospitals and clinics are still charging up to $7000 for an ultrasound without insurance, but around $300-$600 with insurance. This is pitiful since a new top-tier ultrasound machine is priced at less than $50K, refurbished.
So, after 100 readings via insurance the machine is paid off. That will take a month at 4 readings a day. For the next several years, minus maintenance, the income from ultrasounds, a 30+ year old technology, is pure profit.
If they charged just $50 per reading they could pay off the machine in 10 months and still be reaping lots of profit, just not enough to allow the CEO and upper management to retire when they are 50.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I think in this case, the colours are not just based on density, but on absorption spectrum i.e. atomic composition, as well as simply attenuation.
The use of multiple energy x-ray beams to determine atomic composition has been around for a long time. It's been a common feature of commercial CT scanners for 10 years. The idea would be that by making crude two-point measurements of the absorption spectrum, you could measure the quantity of an atom of interest - for example, if the patient had been given an iodine dye, the dual-energy technique could precisely quantify the iodine concentration in one acquisition more robustly than taking one scan before the dye, and one after and subtracting. Or, in the case of certain diseases like kidney stones, by measuring the calcium concentration in the stone, you could confidently start a particular treatment, without actually needing to wait to collect a stone for lab analysis.
About 2-3 years ago, more sophisticated CT detectors have been commercialised, offering a spectroscopic measurement - i.e. they can measure multiple energy bands simultaneously - so by using multiple polychromatic x-ray beams and spectral detectors, you can get a multi-point spectrum for each voxel, and also improve image quality by being able to measure scattered photons and correct the reconstruction process for them. The idea with this is that you might be better able to quantify multiple different atoms - like iron and calcium - so, by biasing the image contrast towards iron, you might improve detection of blood clots.
The novelty of this technique is that it appears to be a photon counting system with continuous energy measurement - so instead of measuring a spectrum with 4 or 5 broad energy bins, this is a high resolution spectrograph with single photon sensitivity. Essentially, it takes the current spectral CT technology one step further, by delivering a higher spectral resolution.
As this type of spectral imaging has only been commercialised for a few years, the actual medical applications are not yet clear. It is an active area for clinical research, with medical teams trying out the enhanced capability of spectral imaging to determine where it may be of value.