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A Panoramic View of Your Insides

Posted by kdawson on Thu Nov 08, 2007 11:48 AM
from the fantastic-voyage dept.
Biotech Science
deepcleanfun writes "Researchers from New Mexico and Taiwan have invented a tiny probe — about the size of a rice grain — equipped with an ultrasound scanner that can travel through veins and arteries, taking ultrasound images of its surroundings. Unlike previous probes that travel through the body, which provide a view from only one direction at a time, the new device has seven imagers integrated onto the hexagonal prism that can see nearly everywhere at once."
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Submission: New Body Probe Gives Panoramic View of Your Inside by deepcleanfun (1182779)
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  • Still untested though (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fred_A (10934) <fred.fredshome@org> on Thursday November 08 2007, @11:53AM (#21282613) Homepage
    Apparently they haven't even gotten around to testing it on animals yet. But they say it works great in a glass of water. The news might be a bit premature.
    No nice pics either.

    • No nice pics either.
      Probably because we all know what the inside of a glass of water looks like...
      • But not from....the INSIDE!

        Layne

        • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I guess you've never been to a pool/river/lake have you? You probably only leave the basement to go to class.
          • Oh sure, I've been to those....but I've never seen through the walls to the outside.....if they dropped one of these in a glass, I'd like to see the distorted view of the surroundings......and how that might look....basically it would like being in a fish tank.

            Layne
      • Without knowing all of the details, I can only make an assumption. Small probes like this typically operate at higher frequencies. With ultrasound, higher frequency means better resolution, but the images dont penetrate as far. Thus for really high resolution images of your insides, the probe must be placed inside the body to get close enough to the target. This would allow the probe to be left in the body with a full panoramic view, so you don't need to worry about it's orientation.

        • [...] dont penetrate as far [...] you don't need to worry about it's orientation.
          When talking about having a probe inside one's body, I think the orientation is somewhat significant.

          I'm all for tolerance and each to their own, but I don't want no gay probe in MY body! :P

      • Re:Still untested though (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ShiningSomething (1097589) on Thursday November 08 2007, @12:31PM (#21283137)
        They don't take pictures: it's an ultrasound. So it's not limited to looking around it, it can see beyond the blood vessels, in places that are hard to ultrasound from outside the body. From TFA:

        Ultrasound scanners are normally used to peer into the body from the outside, in order to examine unborn babies or look for tumours, for example. Enabling these devices to penetrate deep inside the body, and to provide accurate images at this depth, is difficult because longer wavelengths are required, which dramatically reduce resolution.
        So you get the ultrasound machine inside the body, right next to what you want to study. Since sonograms usually look at flows (you see heartbeats, bloddflows, etc), having input from different directions at the same time is much better than having a sequence of sonograms. So that's why it's an improvement.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Cornflake917 (515940)

          They don't take pictures: it's an ultrasound.
          You can usually use the information from the ultrasounds to get pictures though.
          • Yeah, sure. I just meant they're not "taking pictures" as in photographs or video (which they could, right?). Ultrasound is indeed an imaging technique, so they are creating images.
        • YES that thing can do nice US and/or Doppler pictures from the other side of the skull (from inside, were the interesting blood vessels are).

          The question that I ask is :
          How are you going to avoid it clogging terminal arteries ?

          They speak about injecting it to analyse the blood vessels in the brain. The problem is that, higher than the base of the skull the arteries are of the terminal type (ie.: every artery only leads to smaller vessels that feed the brain cells. no artery is inter-connected with other art

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by davidfromoz (801492)

          There are devices that do this kind of thing already. They are called Intravascular Ultrasound. They are mounted on a catheter and they generate a 360 degree view. Its largely used for looking at vessel lining, though some work has been done with it in the heart chambers.

          To my knowledge, which may be wrong, they do not measure flow (Doppler), it would usually not be effective since the plane of the image is perpendicular to the catheter. Since flow is normally parallel to the catheter the Doppler effe

  • Origami style manufacturing. (Score:4, Informative)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna (970587) on Thursday November 08 2007, @11:54AM (#21282617) Journal
    Origami is the art of making figures by folding paper. They seem to have fabricated the sonar emitters in a flat piece and folded it into a hexagon. That seems to be the key to get multiple views.

  • Without pics (Score:5, Funny)

    by jav1231 (539129) on Thursday November 08 2007, @11:56AM (#21282659)
    Without pics you weren't IN my insides!

  • How does this not kill you? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RandoX (828285) on Thursday November 08 2007, @12:02PM (#21282743)
    Isn't having solid stuff in your bloodstream bad?
  • it could be a Fantastic Voyage.
  • So doctors will now be able to see in 3D that the arterial blockage that killed the patient is the little probe they sent in to find a suspected arterial blockage?

    Cool tech and all, but how do they control where it goes?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by wattrlz (1162603)
      There's a highly paid professional standing by the bedside manipulating the catheter by hand eg: twisting, pushing, and tugging a little tube to which the device is attached.

  • Martin Short... (Score:4, Funny)

    by butterwise (862336) <butterwise AT gmail> on Thursday November 08 2007, @12:06PM (#21282815)
    ...has generously offered to pilot the device.

  • Privacy concerns? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Couldn't this be used to track people? Is this project corporately funded? Follow the money.

  • different strokes (Score:4, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Thursday November 08 2007, @12:10PM (#21282863)
    Some people make tiny rice-sized probes to look at someone's insides while others simply go the Goatse route...
  • Without having read TFA (hey, this is slashdot) I assume this is for passing through a person's digestive system and not their bloodstream because getting a something the size of a piece of rice caught in the right place is like having a stroke, a heart attack, or other unhappy circulatory problems; and since I doubt it carries enough power to navigate it'd be pretty tough to keep it out of vital organs.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Jaidan (1077513)
      It will be attached to the end of a "wire like endoscope" So no it's navigation won't be so much of a problem...They go so far as to say they will by able to pass it up into blood vessels in the brain to measure blood flow. Kinda weird, I would be bothered by the idea of a wire in my brain.
  • I interviewed with a doctor at Northwestern University Hospital in 1989 or so for an ultrasonic catheter to look at plaques/heart valves and such. There was come California based company who had the hardware, but not mush software, hence my interview.

  • Colonoscopies (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For those of you of colonoscopy age... I asked my doctor if he could do my last two colonoscopies using only the pain-killer fentanyl, and omitting Versed (midolazam). The latter is a sedative and muscle-relaxant, but it induces drowsiness and often produces retrograde amnesia, i.e. you are conscious and awake but afterwards don't remember what happened.

    I'm glad I did. I did not experience any serious pain; at two points, presumably when going around corners, I felt something like a bad gas pain lasting onl

  • Yes, it goes in the blood stream (Score:5, Informative)

    by MrMunkey (1039894) on Thursday November 08 2007, @12:23PM (#21283027) Homepage
    People... the only thing that is different about this than other instruments already in use today is that it can view in more than one direction simultaneously. How do you think an angiogram is performed? They stick the think in through the artery in your leg, and fish it up to the spot where the blockage is. Sure, it sounds scary, but it's done every day. I think this is a great improvement to help doctors.
    • No, some liquid which shows up on X-ray is put into the artery through the catheter, the catheter does not have to be shifted up to the location of the blockage/. On the photograph one will see where it gets narrow, the black line produced by the contrast fluid gets thinner.
      • Angioplasty is where they stick things in your veins in order to sort them out.

        A colleague of mine had a heart problem with a thin wall between two of the chambers causing oxygenated and de-oxygenated blood to mix. These things aren't uncommon and many people live with it without problem. However this guy is a scuba diver, and these heart problems can be dangerous. His doctor said 'stop diving'.

        He called for a second opinion, and discovered that they can stick a cylindrical probe up your femoral art
  • What sort of rice is one millimeter across and one millimeter long? Something got lost when going from Imperial to Metric...
  • Is this not what an aneurysm is? I can see it now. We appear to be loosing signal; it has gone to far we can not stop the sensor. Patient colapses.
  • ...but I found some here: http://goatse.cz/ [goatse.cz]
  • ---begin sarcastic comment---

    Isn't there someone that holds the "Origami Hexagon Fold" Patent that is going to sue them?

    How about someone holding the "Using waves to view internal organs in a human body" Patent?

    Or maybe the "Etching of ultrasound emitting device on silicon wafers" patent?

    ---end sarcastic comment---

    Seriously,

    if this invention grows to be used in humans, it will really provide some serious insights on disease prevention and diagnosis. I just hope that the patent morons don't destroy another

  • Can it be.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by sw155kn1f3 (600118) on Thursday November 08 2007, @03:41PM (#21285885)
    .. used on Uranus :)?
    Can't resist.
  • Go looking for all that gum I swallowed when I was a kid.
  • It's kind of an "inside scan sonar!"

    Thank you, thank you... I'm here all week... Be sure to try out the buffet!

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