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First ever color X-ray on a human
- matheist 8y agoArticle is short on details. Do they take pictures with X-rays at three different wavelengths, and then render the three resulting images as individual color channels?
- tshannon 8y agoAnd get 3 times the does of radiation? Seems impractical, but possibly true.
- sametmax 8y agoA chest x-ray will give you 0.1 millisieverts. That's the 60th of the dose limit used in scientific facilities like cern. And 200 times less than for radiation workers. It's still ok, it's not supposed to be that of a regular procedure.
- russdill 8y agoX-ray sources are not "monochromatmic" and produce photons across a wide range: http://www.ctlab.geo.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Fig02.gif http://www.ctlab.geo.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/F...
- Dylan16807 8y agoThat's not a yes or no. In normal imaging, you need three times as much white light to capture a good color image, because each portion of the film/sensor is only sensitive to a single color. Does this technology avoid that problem?
- phyzome 8y ago> The colours represent different energy levels of the X-ray photons as recorded by the detector http://www.eurekamagazine.co.uk/design-engineering-news/first-3d-colour-x-ray-of-a-human-using-cern-technology/176081/ http://www.eurekamagazine.co.uk/design-engineering-news/firs... There are a bunch of ways to convert that to an RGB display, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple rendering options you can flip between until you find the one that gives you the visual discrimination you're looking for.
- zokier 8y agoMy particle physics is bit fuzzy, but isn't the energy level of photon directly related to wavelength? So you could do a simple frequency shift (+compress) to visible light spectrum and map them to colors that way? Of course that is the naive approach, and might not be useful from medical perspective.
- phyzome 8y agoYeah, you could do a linear mapping, but you might want to stretch some regions and compress others. But overall it just sounds like a wavelength transform, yes.
- RyJones 8y agoThere are slightly more details on the product page [0]. It looks like they have a small bore version right now, they're working on making a human sized one. There is one test image that shows part of a wrist, a watch, and part of a hand. [0] https://www.marsbioimaging.com/mars/overview/ https://www.marsbioimaging.com/mars/overview/
- phyzome 8y agoOh yeah, and if you scroll down, there's a lot more detail. Sounds like you can customize the color mapping somewhat in their software -- there's mention of adjustable binning and customizable energy thresholds.
- Exuma 8y agoThis honestly seems like raw black magic. How is this possible?
- jrockway 8y agoI mean, all color is is your brain's perception of 3 input channels. Your eye can detect (roughly) the amount of stimulation from blue light, green light, and red light... your brain interprets this as a color. You can do the same thing for X-rays, or any 3-channel data source. (Fun fact: because of this, there are colors that your brain can understand but aren't wavelengths of light. Magenta is seen when your blue and red sensors are activated... but there is no single wavelength of light that can do this. Meanwhile, your eye can't tell the difference between monochromatic yellow light, or red and green light being received simultaneously. This is why RGB monitors work, and why you can't represent every color you can see on a computer screen.)
- scentoni 8y agoAnother article at http://www.eurekamagazine.co.uk/design-engineering-news/first-3d-colour-x-ray-of-a-human-using-cern-technology/176081/ http://www.eurekamagazine.co.uk/design-engineering-news/firs... It sounds like the chips are detecting the energy of each xray, which is equivalent to a wavelength, and that data is then used to synthesize a 3D image.
- barbegal 8y agoThe 3D nature of the output is still generated using tomography (CT). The colour comes from the x-ray energy which is detected using two thresholds giving effectively two channels of data.
- nathan_f77 8y agoThis feels like a real black swan event to me. I guess I just assumed that black-and-white x-rays were as good as it gets, and that there wasn't any room for improvement. I've never even thought about the idea of a color x-ray. It's very exciting to see something that could change the entire field of radiology.
- notadoc 8y agoOsiriX (and others) have been rendering radiology imaging in color and 3D for quite a while. https://www.osirix-viewer.com/osirix/osirix-md/ https://www.osirix-viewer.com/osirix/osirix-md/ https://www.osirix-viewer.com/resources/dicom-image-library/ https://www.osirix-viewer.com/resources/dicom-image-library/ Patients can even download the lite version and review their own images.
- ashildr 8y agoWhile the title is disingenuous because it’s easy to misunderstand it’s actually very close to the truth. Xrays are just a very energetic form of light or electromagnetic radiation, above the spectrum of visible light. Until now we only measure the general brightness of the xrays, and osirix translates (even marginal) differences in brightness into different colors. This makes features of the same brightness easier to spot for a human. This new technique actually measures different wavelengths of the xrays on our detectors and since we call the different wavelengths in visual light "color" it's a good analogy to call them the same for xrays. It can differentiate different colors of xrays. This is really promising, nuances in chemical composition may lead to differences in opacity for different wavelengths.
- nathan_f77 8y agoYes I wouldn't be so impressed with a colorized image if the source was just a regular x-ray. But my impression was that they were capturing multiple frequencies, so it was a lot of extra information to the image. I don't know anything about radiology but I'm always excited to see some progress.
- lostlogin 8y ago
- elorant 8y agoEvery now and then a question pops as to why we have to invest billions in researching particle physics and how can it improve our lives. Well this is how.
- notadoc 8y agoSurely much more to come too.
- sloka 8y ago“The new device, based on the traditional black-and-white X-ray, incorporates particle-tracking technology developed for CERN's Large Hadron Collider.” Now i have an easy to understand example to make my skeptical friends understand how CERN’s research benefits us in myriad ways.
- Florin_Andrei 8y agoFundamental science research always has applications decades in the future. It's pretty rare that practical applications are found "now".
- s0rce 8y agoFamously Hertz claimed there would be no application of radio waves.
- zokier 8y agoThere is a distinction to be made on the results of the fundamental research itself, and then the sideproducts of the engineering that enables that research. From the sounds of it, this Xray thingy belongs more in the latter category.
- Create 8y agoYour problem will be, that it is very easy to argue for somebody knowledgeable in the field, that this can be done completely without CERN’s research. Actually, similar stuff has already been done.
- perl4ever 8y agoThere's also the whole World Wide Web thing...
- Create 8y agoAre you referring to the stripped down SGML, RPC or hyperlinks? Or the combination? Because all three have been around much before. In many flavours and mixes. The WWW variant’s adoption had more to do with politics than scientific/technical merit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSyfZkVgasI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSyfZkVgasI https://archive.org/details/paulotlet https://archive.org/details/paulotlet or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLX2OGw31Oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLX2OGw31Oo
- ortusdux 8y agoThe videos on their press page are stunning. Especially the ankle rotation video. https://www.marsbioimaging.com/mars/media-pack/ https://www.marsbioimaging.com/mars/media-pack/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JyRdqyU-j5PambGUgfs4Cx5uKf3wdSG4/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JyRdqyU-j5PambGUgfs4Cx5uKf3...
- 1996 8y agoDoesn't look that much better than a thin slice CT with custom colormaps ("CLUTs"), using a regular greyscale for the high density tissue (bone), and a reduced alpha channel for the low density tissue rendered in yellow. You can get that with a Dicom station and 5 minutes, or for free using Osirix at home and trial/error if you are not used to CTs. Ask for the CD next time you get a scan, or download one of the many examples, and play with Osirix.
- 1123581321 8y agoThat may be, but an X-ray is a simpler and cheaper procedure. To achieve “feature parity” with something more expensive is an advance. I’m looking up the things you mentioned and they’re interesting, though. I’d love to see imaging and home-computed assessments become a bigger part of the “quantified self” movement.
- natezb 8y agoWhat you linked to is a type of CT scan (CT uses X-rays).
- s0rce 8y agoDo you need a different detector? Can't you just do multiple exposures at different energies like dexa?
- plesqui 8y agoThis is very interesting! I can't wait to learn more about it. There are, however, some questions to consider: - For a given procedure, will the radiation dose be higher than its corresponding 'black and white' X-Ray? - If the radiation dose is higher, does the color add additional information or does it increase the diagnostic capabilities? Traditional X-rays (CT) already distinguish between soft-tissue, bone, fat, cartilage... so will the color distinguish structures within soft-tissue?
- lars_thomas 8y agoPhoton counting sensors have been available for quite a while. This is unfortunately not new. It’s not ’color’ it’s multi channel imaging. X-ray tubes produce wide spectrum of x-rays, these type of sensors are able to put different bands to different buckets. Coloring is arbitrary and conveniently chosen in the example to look like visible wavelength response as if the patient was dissected. It does not work for more complicated anatomy and even in this case needs very likely post processing. I wish we could have a peek inside the patient as if we had opened it up but this is not yet that.
- voxadam 8y agoIt seems like this is more akin to 'false color'.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color
- jlglover 8y agoExactly. Researchers have been doing tomography with energy-dispersive detectors for decades, especially at synchrotrons. They often represent that data in 3D with false color indicating material properties. If there is something particularly novel about this work, it's not clear from the article, which reads like a rehash of a University PR piece.
- DINKDINK 8y ago>Coloring is arbitrary By my understanding, it's not possible to determine an objections interaction characteristics with a wavelength of X with a wavelength of Y. (Unless you were able to create some sort of beat frequency tuned to mimic X by sending in Y+delta? Just thinking off the top of my head). It seems fraudulent for the company to say that it's capturing color. >these type of sensors are able to put different bands to different buckets. Would the best summarization be, photon counting sensors allow for the capture of x-ray imagine with higher dimensionality?
- lars_thomas 8y agoPretty much. Normal x-ray sensors are like camera sensors and produce an estimate of total energy of the photons / pixel. Photon counting sensors are able to estimate how many photons of certain energy range hit the sensor. So instead of value ’1023’ you might get ’63’ of < 20kv, ’500’ of 20-50kv and ’50’ of > 50kv. So poor mans spectroscopy. Naive way to produce ’color images’ would be to put those buckets to red green and blue channel and now different materials along the beam path might yield equal values with normal x-ray sensors but slightly different colors with photon counting sensors. edit: clarified last sentence
- wycx 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medipix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medipix After much searching I found the energy resolution here [1], stated as <2 keV. For comparison, a modern silicon drift diode fluorescence detector will have an energy resolution of ~130 eV. [1] http://dpnc.unige.ch/seminaire/talks/campbell.pdf http://dpnc.unige.ch/seminaire/talks/campbell.pdf Also: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-0221/8/02/C02016/pdf http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-0221/8/02/C02...
- randcraw 8y agoHow much exposure to radiation is needed for this? Their brochure indicates 20-80 mGy/mSv. But a typical clinical head CT is only 2 mGy. AFAIK, exposures that high would not be acceptable for clinical human use. It's probably inevitable that a 'spectral' scanner requires greater exposure than clinical CT scanners since the intensity of a spectral X-ray source apparently varies during the scan. This implies slower scans and more X-ray exposure than a conventional CT. Apparently that's why MARS' current product is intended for preclinical (non-human) use only.
- ptrott2017 8y agoI remember discussing this as a possibility with Phil and Anthony in CERN Cafetera in 2007/2008 when they had first licensed some imaging tech from CERN. It is absolutely thrilling to see how far the team have come since then and to see them start to get the wider coverage their achievements deserve. Seeing this on HN just made my day.
- tzahola 8y agoTL;DR it’s CT with false colors
- Jaruzel 8y agoDirect link to the source: https://home.cern/about/updates/2018/07/first-3d-colour-x-ray-human-using-cern-technology https://home.cern/about/updates/2018/07/first-3d-colour-x-ra...
- Rjevski 8y agoThe GDPR consent screen for this is scary. They want to share your data with around 200 different "partners".
- PeterisP 8y agoAnd a year ago they wouldn't even tell you that.