A New Zealand company has produced the world’s first 3D colour X-rays of living human body parts. It scanned, for the first time, a human body using a breakthrough colour medical scanner based on the Medipix3 technology developed at CERN.
Medipix is a family of read-out chips for particle imaging and detection. The original concept of Medipix is that it works like a camera, detecting and counting each individual particle hitting the pixels when its electronic shutter is open.
This enables high-resolution, high-contrast, very reliable images, making it unique for imaging applications in particular in the medical field. 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 as recorded by the detector and hence identifying different components of body parts such as fat, water, calcium, and disease markers.
So far, researchers have been using a small version of the MARS scanner to study cancer, bone and joint health, and vascular diseases that cause heart attacks and strokes.
As all the information is contained within the energy of the photon, and the distribution of photons, a high radiation dose is not necessary to achieve a high quality image. This has benefits for researchers planning to do longitudinal studies, repeatedly scanning the same subject.
MARS spectral CT delivers more accurate information about location and density of specific targets, which offers the potential to improve the accuracy of dose calculation in treatments such as radiotherapy.
News Source: https://home.cern/about/updates/2018/07/first-3d-colour-x-ray-human-using-cern-technology
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