New Zealand Scientists Perform First-Ever 3-D Color X-ray on a Human

DooKey

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Scientists in New Zealand have performed the first-ever 3-D Color X-Ray on a human being. This new technology provides an accurate picture of the x-ray site that will allow for more accurate diagnosis of medical conditions. What makes this technology unique is it's use of particle-tracking technology developed by CERN's Large Hadron Collider team. The tech is called Medipix and it detects and counts individual sub-atomic particles as they collide with pixels in the X-ray machine. Who says all of those billions spent on a particle accelerator are just good for physics research?

The machine's "small pixels and accurate energy resolution meant that this new imaging tool is able to get images that no other imaging tool can achieve," said developer Phil Butler of the University of Canterbury.
 
Sounds like they basically made a higher resolution CCD imager, maybe one that has "deeper wells" to capture electrons or faster reading so they don't overflow into adjacent pixels. Then overlay with some generic color code based on photon count detected, which really wouldn't be that different than existing tech, I mean it's not like they shoot out red, blue, green xrays :D
 
The cited article gets some details wrong: while CERN developed Medipix to count sub-atomic particles, that's not what it's being used for here:

"MARS Bioimaging Ltd, which is commercialising the 3D scanner, is linked to the University of Otago and Canterbury. ...
MARS’ solution couples the spectroscopic information generated by the Medipix3 enabled detector with powerful algorithms to generate 3D images. The colours represent different energy levels of the X-ray photons" -- photons are not considered sub-atomic particles.

Better article on this from the CERN website:
First 3D colour X-ray of a human using CERN technology, by Romain Muller
 
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"Sir, as your proctologist, I highly recommend a 3D color x-ray of your rectum and large intestine to check for polyps and other things that don't belong there."
 
"Sir, as your proctologist, I highly recommend a 3D color x-ray of your rectum and large intestine to check for polyps and other things that don't belong there."


The term is "foreign objects". I clearly remember 25 years ago in my radiology department a patient was scanned for an obstruction in his rectum. they found a cucumber on the CT scan. Another patient was scanned and they found a gerbel with a string attached to it. Then there were cases of "fisting" a gay guy would stick his fist up the rectum of his partner and on occasion it got stuck their. Quite an interesting event when they came in like conjoined twins to the ER. Those were among the lighter moments in 30 years of radiology department experience.
 
Sounds like they basically made a higher resolution CCD imager, maybe one that has "deeper wells" to capture electrons or faster reading so they don't overflow into adjacent pixels. Then overlay with some generic color code based on photon count detected, which really wouldn't be that different than existing tech, I mean it's not like they shoot out red, blue, green xrays :D

Yeah, I'd assume it's just matching the detected material to a lookup table for the various tissue types.
 
The term is "foreign objects". I clearly remember 25 years ago in my radiology department a patient was scanned for an obstruction in his rectum. they found a cucumber on the CT scan. Another patient was scanned and they found a gerbel with a string attached to it. Then there were cases of "fisting" a gay guy would stick his fist up the rectum of his partner and on occasion it got stuck their. Quite an interesting event when they came in like conjoined twins to the ER. Those were among the lighter moments in 30 years of radiology department experience.

Yeah, I was thinking of foreign objects, but I didn't want to seem too forward with my wording. But I know what you mean, and you also made me laugh.

While I was finishing up both my AF career and my degree during my stint at George AFB (ca. ~late 1991), one of the classes I took was environmental chemistry. Like most undergrad college classes, we were tasked with term papers, but pretty much had enough leeway to research just about anything. Anyway, another student in the same class who worked as an EMT did her paper on just such foreign objects, and actually had a half dozen or so x-ray films she shared with us as part of her presentation. One or two showed a telephone cable shoved up some guy's urethra so far that it coiled up in his bladder, while the others were images of various sized flasks that had gotten stuck by way of one or more hershey highways. While she didn't share anything that would normally find itself part of somebody's salad fixin's, if I recall correctly, one of the examples could have been an image of an empty salad dressing bottle (or maybe a full one?). Talk about eye-opening, jaw dropping stuff.

Never did figure out what her presentation had to do with environmental chemistry...
 
Great, so now we have to worry about a black hole forming inside us?
 
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