
New Machine Can See Bones, Organs in Stunning Detail - mef
http://www.gereports.com/post/107344100845/body-of-knowledge-new-machine-can-see-bones
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wyldfire
I'm on the design team for this product.

In the CT "super premium" market, the major players focused on different specs
and tried to convince hospitals that the future of CT was in this direction
(volume/slices/coverage, temporal resolution/cardiac, dose, new
imaging/spectral, spatial resolution). Revolution CT is GE's attempt to
deliver something that unifies on these goals and they hope to sweep this high
end market.

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disputin
"they hope to sweep this high end market"

How long before something like this ends up in the Gp's office?

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Cthulhu_
When said GP has a few million to spend on stuff like this. And when they're
no longer needed to send 80% of people home because they have the sniffles and
need a doctor to tell them it's just a cold instead of ebola. (Because that's
what GP's do in a lot of cases - deal with people who think they've got
something worth going to a doctor for).

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vxNsr
Yeah, my mom (who is a doctor) was just complaining about this, when she just
started out she was a GP in pediatrics and said that 95% of cases were the
common cold + over reacting parent, it made it much more difficult to find the
interesting cases (read: actually sick kids who needed real treatment), she
now works in ICUs and ERs and loves every minute.

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iamben
This sort of thing is so exciting. I was at the Hunterian
([https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums/hunterian](https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums/hunterian))
last year and it's incredible to see how barbaric fixing (or trying to fix)
someone was - and how far it's come in 100 years. Which I hope is much the
same as our descendants will be thinking about medicine and surgery now.

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johnloeber
That looks very impressive. However, I ask how effective this machine actually
is on a medical level. Do these scans provide an advantage over traditional CT
scans in that they collect more information? Are they more accurate?

The reason I ask this is because I as a layperson am of course very impressed
by the colored, realistic-looking, detailed textured scans -- but will this
actually make a difference for a medical/clinical purpose? Will this enable
doctors to make better decisions/assessments?

I suspect it will, so I'm very pleased with this innovation. I also note that
it might provide more fodder for medical image recognition programs. This
tool, combined with good computer vision and analytics, could be very powerful
indeed.

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lemming
The article is a little light on detail. However I see a cardiologist every
couple of years due to a strong family history of isochaemic heart disease.
He's been putting off more invasive scans since nothing in my medical
presentation suggests I actually have a problem, but he said that this sort of
scan where they'll be able to look for blockages on moving arteries will be a
game changer for cardiac diagnosis - it's the very fast scanning on moving
tissue that will be the big improvement. It's not clear whether this new
machine actually provides that from the article, but he was expecting it to be
developed and in use within the next couple of years.

~~~
wyldfire
Revolution indeed provides superior temporal resolution over its predecessor.

Though arguably Siemens dual-tube, dual-detector design provides yet better
still temporal resolution.

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mattholtom
This is absolutely beautiful and makes me believe I'm living in the future.

~~~
soylentcola
Yep. I've often fantasized about a day when imaging and scanning tech is at
the point where you can obtain a high resolution, three dimensional scan of a
person's body and then apply software analysis that can detect all sorts of
potential issues.

Sure, I basically described Star Trek or any number of sci-fi med bays but
when comparing the sorts of internal imaging we could do 50 years ago to what
can be done today, it makes me wonder what might be possible 50 years from
now. Definitely just daydreaming on my part but seeing things like modern
medical imaging always makes me think of it.

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joelthelion
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this just looks like a modern CT scan.
Impressive, of course, but definitely not a revolution. These machines have
been steadily improving for thirty years.

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timthorn
The novel aspect is the very rapid exposure time at high resolution.

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angrymouse
Medical imaging is a really interesting field.

Place I do a lot of work with are working on new imaging systems to map human
organs like the heart.

While back featured by the BBC here:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27536599](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27536599)

I only do web stuff but I love chatting to them about their systems when i can

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saganus
This is actually quite impressive!

I wonder how much time it takes to scan one person?

If these were made and distributed to enough hospitals adn scan is fast/cheap
enough, I'm guessing you could make things quite more efficient/accurate

~~~
car
CT scan time is ~0.2-0.5 seconds for a 160mm slice, so a whole body can
probably be scanned fairly quickly. However, CT scanning is only done for the
body parts of interest, to keep radiation exposure low.

Most fascinating here is the ability to capture a beating heart!

~~~
ahelwer
It's also computationally intensive to reconstruct all the x-ray images into a
3D model. I worked for a company that wrote software to speed this up with
GPGPUs. Standard software packages took on the order of hours for one scan,
while parallelism brought it down to 10s of minutes - this was just to
transform the x-ray data into voxels. Not sure how long the post-processing to
identify & highlight organs would take.

It doesn't matter so much for humans, though. The main market for the above-
mentioned software product was research labs imaging hundreds of lab rats.

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marvin
The pretty pictures in the article can be rendered in real time using GPUs.
Unless the pictures here use techniques that I haven't heard about, it is done
by treating the voxels as a semi-transparent cloud of different-colored
materials and using a fragment/pixel shader to simulate rays of light
projected through this volume. It's pretty straightforward; the volume data is
stored in a 3D texture and each ray of light is simulated using one "pixel" of
the fragment shader.

This is enhanced by assigning more weight to the voxels that are in a boundary
region between tissues of different density (you see this effect in the
pictures of lungs, kidneys etc; the organ is transparent but the edges are
visible) and applying a shading model to these boundary regions to improve
perception of their spatial orientation.

Different organs can be pre-selected by marking their constituent voxels, and
different models/colors/shading applied to each organ. This process can also
sometimes be automated, if you have the luxury of a table that correlates
voxel intensity (x-ray absorption value) with tissue type (bone, muscle, air,
etc).

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ajuc
I thought even to get voxels you first have to "solve sudoku"?

You have sum of all the voxels "opacity" along rays from many directions and
you want to know each voxel opacity.

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ahelwer
It's much, much simpler than that. You just project a ray from the X-ray point
source through the center of a voxel onto the detector, interpolate the X-ray
energy detected, and add that energy to the sum in that voxel. Repeat for each
voxel and each x-Ray taken (CT scans take a bunch of x-Rays going around in a
circle), remove some noise, and boom you've voxelled the data. Fundamentally
you're just summing the energy that passes through each point in space. It's
trivially parallelizeable.

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fantan
Thes 3d scans are very pretty when visualized in an oculus rift:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWGBRsV9omw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWGBRsV9omw)

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sanj
Any sense of cost? I'd love to have my insides available for me to see.

~~~
wyldfire
In the US I think that they may be by prescription-only? Maybe not, worth a
call to your local outpatient diagnostic imaging center. Don't call a
hospital, they'll charge you too much.

I'd guess you could get one from any-old-CT-scanner for something like $500 to
$1000? Someone who just bought this Revolution scanner will probably charge
much more. Apparently some people get charged upwards of 10k USD [1]!

But honestly if you just want images of your guts you'd be fine with any old
CT.

Once you have the 2d axial images, you can probably find open source software
that will do the 3d projection.

1 - [http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/07/that-
ct-...](http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/07/that-ct-scan-
costs-how-much/index.htm)

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sanj
Maybe Uber should get behind this. Click a button and have a Revolution
scanner show up outside your house.

~~~
wyldfire
Believe it or not, there is a mobile CT! It's on a semi truck, though.

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72deluxe
Those pictures are mighty impressive, but made me feel ill very quickly.

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bjwbell
Made me think of all the things that can go wrong.

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__john
tumblr is blocked where I work, here's an imgur link of the image in question
[http://imgur.com/9XZgzGv](http://imgur.com/9XZgzGv)

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djrogers
"tumblr is blocked where I work"

You need a new job ;-)

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mkevac
How is this different from modern MRI?

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stefantalpalaru
What's with the fake colors?

later edit: dear downvoters, you only get gray levels from a CT and those
pretty colors assigned after what I assume is automated segmentation don't
improve the diagnosis. I'd guess that any segmentation errors make the
visualization more difficult.

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Velox
The colours provide contrast. It makes it much easier for a doctor to find the
parts they are interested in as quickly as possible. Not to mention the fact
that doctors aren't always interested in the tiniest imperfections and may be
looking for large changes.

When you have things segemented out and coloured, it is also much easier to
view the object, be it an organ, blood vessel, etc. in 3 dimensions, which is
something that is very useful.

Admittedly, they can get in the way sometimes, but that's why it is an
optional feature.

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billpg
"New Machine Can See Bones, Organs in Stunning Detail"

I call it a big knife. (b'dom ksh)

~~~
billpg
"Humor is such a subjective thing, don't you think, Mollari?" \-- Emperor
Cartagia, Babylon 5.

