7 ms·

New Machine Can See Bones, Organs in Stunning Detail

166 points by mef 12y ago

saganus 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
    - marvin 12y ago
      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).
      - ajuc 12y ago
        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.
        marvin 12y ago
        Yes, my comment only treats the process from the point where you have a complete dataset of voxels to the point where you have a finished rendering. ahelwer didn't treat this part of the process in his comment.
        ahelwer 12y ago
        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.
- athenot 12y ago
  Unfortunately, there's a tradeoff: each imaging session exposes the patient to radiation. Too much radiation can be problematic. The article does mention lower exposure but it's not clear whether it's just shorter in time (and more intense) or is the total level of radiation actually lower.
  - wyldfire 12y ago
    The dose is primarily a function of the power delivered to the X-Ray source, the size of the beam and the scan's duration. The big features of this device are coverage (160mm) and rotation speed (mostly dose neutral). If you were imaging 160mm before you had to use multiple sequential scans, so the dose is not significantly different from that scenario. Revolution has similar or superior (meaning less) dose than GE's previous high end scanner. GE's high end scanners tend to offer better dose than the competition.
- fluidcruft 12y ago
  IIRC on this scanner, the actual data collection is very fast (few minutes) but the high-quality image reconstruction needs just under an hour. The images in the link are also heavily manually post-processed which is labor intensive.
  - wyldfire 12y ago
    Hour-long reconstruction times are very abnormal. GE sells a low-dose feature branded "Veo" that has ~30-minute reconstruction times. CT750HD spectral imaging (branded GSI) takes as long as 20-minutes. Revolution imaging takes on the order of minutes (2-3). Indeed the 3d post-processing takes time and probably includes many manual steps/tweaks.
    - fluidcruft 12y ago
      We were told 45-50min was typical for the Veo recons a few months ago, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've improved performance in the interim.
      - wyldfire 12y ago
        Hmm, that's too bad. I could've sworn it had hit the 30-minute mark. There haven't been many refreshes so I don't know that it's been improved since the initial release. Well, IMO, after five or so minutes there's not a huge difference between 30 and 60. But it does depend a bit on how the imaging workflow goes (do you wait for those images before letting the patient leave?, e.g.). But you can get some pretty dramatic image quality or dose improvements from Veo, so maybe it's worth it.
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
johnloeber 12y ago
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.
- thibauts 12y ago
  GE claims 0.23mm spacial resolution across a 160mm span in 0.28 seconds if I understand correctly [1]. This would be about 695^3 voxels. Seeing the example captures [2] I guess the device can scan multiple volumes in a row to cover larger spans. [1] http://www3.gehealthcare.com/en/Products/Categories/Computed_Tomography/Revolution_CT http://www3.gehealthcare.com/en/Products/Categories/Computed... [2] http://www3.gehealthcare.com/en/Products/Categories/Computed_Tomography/Revolution_CT/Image_Gallery http://www3.gehealthcare.com/en/Products/Categories/Computed...
- jrapdx3 12y ago
  Yes I agree very nice images. The article was light on detail, but looking at the results it appears, in common with other x-ray imaging, to be most effective with dense tissue, like bone where it reveals fine detail. Soft tissue isn't as well delineated. No doubt that the vascular images were made using contrast media. The value of the new device may well be most evident in the images of vessels in the brain, a region notoriously difficult to visualize adequately. Those images are things of beauty and I can see how the technology could translate to saved lives. (Think about enhanced ability to find a brain aneurism or small bleed.) MRI is complementary as more effective with soft tissue than x-ray, but less useful for dense matter like bone. Amazing how much the world of medicine has changed in the last 40 years. It's a domain where digital technologies have made a startling difference. Great to see these wonderful technologies put to such good use.
- 12y ago
joelthelion 12y ago
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.
- timthorn 12y ago
  The novel aspect is the very rapid exposure time at high resolution.
- wyldfire 12y ago
  You are absolutely correct. Revolution is strictly a brand name. 160mm and 0.28s is an incremental improvement over GE's CT750HD, albeit in two dimensions.
mattholtom 12y ago
This is absolutely beautiful and makes me believe I'm living in the future.
- soylentcola 12y ago
  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.
billpg 12y ago
"New Machine Can See Bones, Organs in Stunning Detail" I call it a big knife. (b'dom ksh)
- billpg 12y ago
  "Humor is such a subjective thing, don't you think, Mollari?" -- Emperor Cartagia, Babylon 5.
fantan 12y ago
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
72deluxe 12y ago
Those pictures are mighty impressive, but made me feel ill very quickly.
- bjwbell 12y ago
  Made me think of all the things that can go wrong.
iamben 12y ago
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.
__john 12y ago
tumblr is blocked where I work, here's an imgur link of the image in question http://imgur.com/9XZgzGv http://imgur.com/9XZgzGv
- djrogers 12y ago
  "tumblr is blocked where I work" You need a new job ;-)
angrymouse 12y ago
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
stefantalpalaru 12y ago
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.
- wyldfire 12y ago
  Interestingly enough with modern CTs you can get more than strictly density/attenuation. Though you're right that indeed these images are using some transform between what they think bone and vascular densities and their colors.
- fluidcruft 12y ago
  Yeah, I was wondering in particular about this one and whether it's actually used for anything other than looking pretty: http://media.tumblr.com/8f42d18fcc4aba25c9ded0e6d47e502b/tumblr_inline_nhuji4Q6FI1qzgziy.jpg http://media.tumblr.com/8f42d18fcc4aba25c9ded0e6d47e502b/tum... Maybe if it was part of a spin?
- ctdonath 12y ago
  As fluidcruft said above: "The images in the link are also heavily manually post-processed which is labor intensive."
- Velox 12y ago
  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.
wyldfire 12y ago
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.
- disputin 12y ago
  "they hope to sweep this high end market" How long before something like this ends up in the Gp's office?
  - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
    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).
    - vxNsr 12y ago
      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.
  - wyldfire 12y ago
    CTs are uncommon in family medicine offices. They'd need to forfeit square feet that could otherwise be used for several exam rooms. The offices that do have them probably opt for really low-end ones. So "never"? As an aside, I think GPs (General Practitioners) are probably phasing out a bit in favor of Physician Assistants and Nurse Practitioners. Though "Family Medicine" still employs lots of MDs.
sanj 12y ago
Any sense of cost? I'd love to have my insides available for me to see.
- wyldfire 12y ago
  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-scan-costs-how-much/index.htm http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/07/that-ct-...
  - sanj 12y ago
    Maybe Uber should get behind this. Click a button and have a Revolution scanner show up outside your house.
    - wyldfire 12y ago
      Believe it or not, there is a mobile CT! It's on a semi truck, though.
- phaedrus441 12y ago
  You probably don't want to get one without a good reason: this uses x-rays, and you get a considerably-higher dose of radiation than something like a normal chest x-ray. As for other comments saying an older machine would be cheaper, etc., this is true, but older machines actually deliver more radiation. All that being said, you can get modern CT scans cheaply in countries other than the US. In Japan, for example, there are ex-pat clinics that give comprehensive medical checkups, which include chest CT scans, starting around US$650, which is absolutely incredible compared to costs here in the States.
mkevac 12y ago
How is this different from modern MRI?

166 points by mef 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
  - marvin 12y ago
    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).
    - ajuc 12y ago
      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.
      - marvin 12y ago
        Yes, my comment only treats the process from the point where you have a complete dataset of voxels to the point where you have a finished rendering. ahelwer didn't treat this part of the process in his comment.
      - ahelwer 12y ago
        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.
athenot 12y ago
Unfortunately, there's a tradeoff: each imaging session exposes the patient to radiation. Too much radiation can be problematic. The article does mention lower exposure but it's not clear whether it's just shorter in time (and more intense) or is the total level of radiation actually lower.
- wyldfire 12y ago
  The dose is primarily a function of the power delivered to the X-Ray source, the size of the beam and the scan's duration. The big features of this device are coverage (160mm) and rotation speed (mostly dose neutral). If you were imaging 160mm before you had to use multiple sequential scans, so the dose is not significantly different from that scenario. Revolution has similar or superior (meaning less) dose than GE's previous high end scanner. GE's high end scanners tend to offer better dose than the competition.
fluidcruft 12y ago
IIRC on this scanner, the actual data collection is very fast (few minutes) but the high-quality image reconstruction needs just under an hour. The images in the link are also heavily manually post-processed which is labor intensive.
- wyldfire 12y ago
  Hour-long reconstruction times are very abnormal. GE sells a low-dose feature branded "Veo" that has ~30-minute reconstruction times. CT750HD spectral imaging (branded GSI) takes as long as 20-minutes. Revolution imaging takes on the order of minutes (2-3). Indeed the 3d post-processing takes time and probably includes many manual steps/tweaks.
  - fluidcruft 12y ago
    We were told 45-50min was typical for the Veo recons a few months ago, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've improved performance in the interim.
    - wyldfire 12y ago
      Hmm, that's too bad. I could've sworn it had hit the 30-minute mark. There haven't been many refreshes so I don't know that it's been improved since the initial release. Well, IMO, after five or so minutes there's not a huge difference between 30 and 60. But it does depend a bit on how the imaging workflow goes (do you wait for those images before letting the patient leave?, e.g.). But you can get some pretty dramatic image quality or dose improvements from Veo, so maybe it's worth it.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]

johnloeber 12y ago

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.

thibauts 12y ago
GE claims 0.23mm spacial resolution across a 160mm span in 0.28 seconds if I understand correctly [1]. This would be about 695^3 voxels. Seeing the example captures [2] I guess the device can scan multiple volumes in a row to cover larger spans. [1] http://www3.gehealthcare.com/en/Products/Categories/Computed_Tomography/Revolution_CT http://www3.gehealthcare.com/en/Products/Categories/Computed... [2] http://www3.gehealthcare.com/en/Products/Categories/Computed_Tomography/Revolution_CT/Image_Gallery http://www3.gehealthcare.com/en/Products/Categories/Computed...
jrapdx3 12y ago
Yes I agree very nice images. The article was light on detail, but looking at the results it appears, in common with other x-ray imaging, to be most effective with dense tissue, like bone where it reveals fine detail. Soft tissue isn't as well delineated. No doubt that the vascular images were made using contrast media. The value of the new device may well be most evident in the images of vessels in the brain, a region notoriously difficult to visualize adequately. Those images are things of beauty and I can see how the technology could translate to saved lives. (Think about enhanced ability to find a brain aneurism or small bleed.) MRI is complementary as more effective with soft tissue than x-ray, but less useful for dense matter like bone. Amazing how much the world of medicine has changed in the last 40 years. It's a domain where digital technologies have made a startling difference. Great to see these wonderful technologies put to such good use.
12y ago

joelthelion 12y ago

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.

timthorn 12y ago
The novel aspect is the very rapid exposure time at high resolution.
wyldfire 12y ago
You are absolutely correct. Revolution is strictly a brand name. 160mm and 0.28s is an incremental improvement over GE's CT750HD, albeit in two dimensions.

mattholtom 12y ago

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

soylentcola 12y ago
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.

billpg 12y ago

"New Machine Can See Bones, Organs in Stunning Detail" I call it a big knife. (b'dom ksh)

billpg 12y ago
"Humor is such a subjective thing, don't you think, Mollari?" -- Emperor Cartagia, Babylon 5.

fantan 12y ago

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

72deluxe 12y ago

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

bjwbell 12y ago
Made me think of all the things that can go wrong.

iamben 12y ago

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.

__john 12y ago

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

djrogers 12y ago
"tumblr is blocked where I work" You need a new job ;-)

angrymouse 12y ago

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

stefantalpalaru 12y ago

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.

wyldfire 12y ago
Interestingly enough with modern CTs you can get more than strictly density/attenuation. Though you're right that indeed these images are using some transform between what they think bone and vascular densities and their colors.
fluidcruft 12y ago
Yeah, I was wondering in particular about this one and whether it's actually used for anything other than looking pretty: http://media.tumblr.com/8f42d18fcc4aba25c9ded0e6d47e502b/tumblr_inline_nhuji4Q6FI1qzgziy.jpg http://media.tumblr.com/8f42d18fcc4aba25c9ded0e6d47e502b/tum... Maybe if it was part of a spin?
ctdonath 12y ago
As fluidcruft said above: "The images in the link are also heavily manually post-processed which is labor intensive."
Velox 12y ago
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.

wyldfire 12y ago

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.

disputin 12y ago
"they hope to sweep this high end market" How long before something like this ends up in the Gp's office?
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  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).
  - vxNsr 12y ago
    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.
- wyldfire 12y ago
  CTs are uncommon in family medicine offices. They'd need to forfeit square feet that could otherwise be used for several exam rooms. The offices that do have them probably opt for really low-end ones. So "never"? As an aside, I think GPs (General Practitioners) are probably phasing out a bit in favor of Physician Assistants and Nurse Practitioners. Though "Family Medicine" still employs lots of MDs.

sanj 12y ago

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

wyldfire 12y ago
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-scan-costs-how-much/index.htm http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/07/that-ct-...
- sanj 12y ago
  Maybe Uber should get behind this. Click a button and have a Revolution scanner show up outside your house.
  - wyldfire 12y ago
    Believe it or not, there is a mobile CT! It's on a semi truck, though.
phaedrus441 12y ago
You probably don't want to get one without a good reason: this uses x-rays, and you get a considerably-higher dose of radiation than something like a normal chest x-ray. As for other comments saying an older machine would be cheaper, etc., this is true, but older machines actually deliver more radiation. All that being said, you can get modern CT scans cheaply in countries other than the US. In Japan, for example, there are ex-pat clinics that give comprehensive medical checkups, which include chest CT scans, starting around US$650, which is absolutely incredible compared to costs here in the States.

mkevac 12y ago

How is this different from modern MRI?