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SCIENCE-HEALTH-TECHNOLOGY
First-ever colour X-ray on a human
PARIS, July 12, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – New Zealand scientists have performed the
first-ever 3-D, colour X-ray on a human, using a technique that promises to
improve the field of medical diagnostics, said Europe’s CERN physics lab
which contributed imaging technology.
The new device, based on the traditional black-and-white X-ray,
incorporates particle-tracking technology developed for CERN’s Large Hadron
Collider, which in 2012 discovered the elusive Higgs Boson particle.
“This colour X-ray imaging technique could produce clearer and more
accurate pictures and help doctors give their patients more accurate
diagnoses,” said a CERN statement.
The CERN technology, dubbed Medipix, works like a camera detecting and
counting individual sub-atomic particles as they collide with pixels while
its shutter is open.
This allows for high-resolution, high-contrast pictures.
The machine’s “small pixels and accurate energy resolution meant that this
new imaging tool is able to get images that no other imaging tool can
achieve,” said developer Phil Butler of the University of Canterbury.
According to the CERN, the images very clearly show the difference between
bone, muscle and cartilage, but also the position and size of cancerous
tumours, for example. The technology is being commercialised by New Zealand
company MARS Bioimaging, linked to the universities of Otago and Canterbury
which helped develop it.
BSS/AFP/ARS/1909 hrs