Bioengineering researcher here, who works mostly on analysis of vascular imaging. Imaging in general is a field in medicine of increasingly growing importance

Bioengineering researcher here, who works mostly on analysis of vascular imaging. Imaging in general is a field in medicine of increasingly growing importance - and as the article suggests its increasingly limited by resolution of the images. I personally see patient-specific diagnostics from image processing to be one of the most promising medical advances to expect in the coming decades. Image resolution is a major thing holding this back, it probably needs to improve ~2-5X for many applications. This kind of thing is exciting, but probably at least a decade from clinical use, if at all from this particular technique. Use in research is itself quite interesting in at, at least to my knowledge, microvessels can only be observed by micro-dissection, which disturbs the tissue. Being able to better observe microvessels clinically could have pretty big implications for heart attacks, strokes, cancers, and kidney functions. The experiment (from the paper) was done on a in vitro (removed) pig heart (and kidneys, reported in the paper but not Medium article). In vitro studies often give much better images than in vivo because there is less I am sceptical of the ability to retrieve the injected gallium, although I am not terribly familiar with its properties. I believe it is a quite rare and expensive metal, and the volumes needed for this would be small but not insignificant (maybe 20mL/ organ imaged?). I could see retrieving it being an issue, and particularly in the heart or brain, blood flow would need to be restored within a few minutes. Iodine contrast agent, which this technique is compared against, is pretty nasty stuff. It gets filtered out by the kidneys, and is toxic to them. If anything, there is a movement to get away from contrast-based CT imaging of vessels and towards MRI or ultrasound, where contrast isn't required.