Medical Imaging Technology

New Developments In Medical Imaging Technology Avoiding invasive surgery or guesswork to diagnose a problem inside the body has long been a priority for healthcare professionals. After the discovery of the X-ray in 1895, we have since benefited from methods like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and ultrasound. We’re now seeing a new wave of innovations that promise to dramatically advance medical scanning.

By Richard Forsyth

New approaches The first MRI scan was way back in 1977 and took five hours. Today it can take anywhere between 15 and 90 minutes depending on the parts being scanned and the amount of images that need to be taken.

Whilst MRI is totally painless, if you are a patient with a potentially serious medical problem, taking an MRI scan can, for some people, be a daunting and challenging experience. Many find it an oppressive process. It can be noisy, and you need to keep perfectly still as you are inserted into a large cylindrical drum. Some of these fears can have a financial impact too, if for example examinations have to be scrapped or repeated but MRI technology is changing and becoming faster and also less intimidating for patients.

A company that is refining and improving 3D imaging but also patient experience in MRI scans, is Phillips. One of the company’s latest developments is an MRI scanner that can carry out examinations 50% faster than the norm. It uses newly designed user interfaces, new patient sensing technologies and Philips’ SmartExam AI-driven analytics for automatic planning, scanning and processing of exams.

But it’s not just the machine itself that is developing, it’s the humanmachine interface. As some patients find MRI scans frightening, they

Photograph courtesy of Philips.

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edical imaging is an area of healthcare provision that is transforming with new advances. It’s an important step in patient treatment as it facilitates a fast diagnosis and helps with evidence-based decision making and personalised treatment. It also minimises complications in surgery and gives healthcare providers a better understanding of diseases and conditions.

The technologies that physicians utilise for scanning our skeleton and internal organs is about to shift up a gear in capability, as we are in an exciting era of development that is opening up new possibilities in terms of what we can see with imaging in this context. Before we look at the new kinds of scanning technology, we should take time to recognise interesting improvements to existing technology, more over in the way the imaging is used and what can be achieved when it is coupled with other types of advanced technology.

AI and imaging The hottest topic in medical imaging has to be its splicing with Artificial

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Intelligence (AI) applications. State of the art machine learning software has the capability to behave, evaluate, organise and recommend courses of action to the same degree of expertise as an experienced clinical assistant. Take Agfa’s IBM Watson, it can review X-ray images and image order to determine serious health issues, highlight prior examinations, differentiate between the less and more relevant parts of patient’s medical history and find out what drugs are being taken.

With intelligence it can find out the right kind of information to point a doctor to the relevant courses of action and solutions.

This kind of assistance means workflow is made much more efficient and accuracy is assured. Whilst there is a lot of data available for many patients, overworked clinicians can have their workload greatly sped up with AI efficiency, which means it’s possible to identify and present the most relevant information from images and associated data, at the right time. Mixing big data, health analytics and imaging is a powerful alchemy for healthcare and will show how eHealth really can connect the dots that people take so much time to, in an instantaneous way.

EU Research

Accurate imaging of internal structures from MRI and CT scans is also leading to new opportunities in healthcare when combined with 3D printing technology. It’s now possible to tailor-make model replacement parts for the body, such a bone, muscle and cartilage. www.euresearcher.com

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“Using this technique, we’ll hopefully be able to identify osteoarthritis earlier, and look at potential treatment before it becomes debilitating,” Dr Turmezei said. “We’ve shown that this technique could be a valuable tool for the analysis of arthritis, in both clinical and research settings. When combined with 3D statistical analysis, it could also be used to speed up the development of new treatments.”

Print out body parts

have created an ambient audio-visual experience to calm patients and guide them through the scan during the process. This includes relaxing imagery – of waves on a beach for example and a bar that shows progress during the exam. It’s a relatively simple addition but it’s had great impact. A study at Herlev Gentofte University Hospital in Denmark shows that Philips’ Ambient Experience in-bore Connect solution helped them reduce the number of rescans by up to 70%, which is a significant improvement, based purely on making the experience of the scan itself more manageable for the patient.

Another new approach to medical imaging is seen in a method pioneered at the University of Cambridge in the UK, that uses an algorithm and 3D images to monitor joints of patients with arthritis, the results of which were published in Scientific Reports.

The technique, called Joint Space Mapping (JSM), was developed

by Dr Tom Turmezei and his colleagues using images from a standard computerised tomography (CT) scan, that’s not normally used to monitor joints. The detailed 3D images identify changes in spaces between the bones of joints under study. It was found to be twice as effective in detecting small structural changes compared to X-rays.

Accurate imaging of internal structures from MRI and CT scans is also leading to new opportunities in healthcare when combined with 3D printing technology. It’s now possible to tailor-make model replacement parts for the body, such a bone, muscle and cartilage.

The breakthrough was published in Nature Biotechnology where living tissues were used to repair bodies of animals. The Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing System (Itop) mixes a biodegradable plastic with a gel that contains cells. When the structure was implanted in animals the plastic broke down to be replaced with the natural structure made up of proteins produced by the cells, allowing blood vessels and nerves to grow into the implants. This presents a potential new chapter of bodily reconstruction that relies on precise 3D imaging in conjunction with 3D printing.

New devices A great opportunity for versatile imaging without the need for a large fixed MRI scanner is in using ultrasound. Already there are systems in development that will give significantly more flexibility in using ultrasound for diagnostic purposes. Science Daily recently reported a prototype all-optical ultrasound imager to demonstrate video-rate, real-time 2D imaging of biological tissue. This is believed to be a first step to making all-optical ultrasound practical for clinical use.

A very exiting step in the industry can be witnessed from quite extraordinary new technology that has made a milestone in healthcare bodily imaging. A company called MARS bioimaging Ltd.

in New Zealand has successfully generated the first 3D colour X-Ray images of the human body with a medical scanner. The device has been in development for a decade and relies on CERN’s Medipix technology, tracking individual sub atomic particles to produce high resolution images. A version of the technology will be made to study cancer and vascular diseases. A licensing agreement between CERN and MARS will mean that this will become a commercial device. Phil Butler, who was part responsible for developing the scanner has said: “Its small pixels and accurate energy resolution mean that this new imaging tool is able to get images that no other imaging tool can achieve.”

Micro scale imaging Imaging can go further than simply taking a peek under the skin for finding broken bones. A team of researchers in Purdue University in the US have developed what is being referred to as a ‘super-resolution nanoscope’ that shows a 3D view of the molecules in the brain at a resolution ten times higher than anything prior to this imaging tool. It is seen as a way to study the plagues that form in a brain to pinpoint for example, the origins of Alzheimer’s disease. As Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the Indiana University School of Medicine’s Stark Neurosciences Research Institute, Gary Landreth, said: “It gives insight into the biological causes of the disease, so that we can stop the formation of these damaging structures in the brain.”

Another breakthrough in the US, this time at the University of Illinois, is a scanner that has been developed that can image living tissue in real time in molecular detail, which does not need dye or chemicals for the scan to be effective. This scanner gives cancer researchers a means to track the progression of tumours and is a useful tool for tissue pathology. It uses timed pulses of light to simultaneously image at multiple wavelengths.

The method, covered in the journal Nature Communications, has been called simultaneous label-free autofluorescence multi harmonic microscopy.

Dr Stephen Boppart, a professor of bioengineering, pioneering the technique, stated: “The way we have been removing, processing and staining tissue for diagnosing diseases has been practiced the same way for over a century. With advances in microscopy techniques such as ours, we hope to change the way we detect, visualise and monitor diseases that will lead to better diagnosis, treatments and outcomes.”

The imaging technique is expected to complement or even replace standard histopathology processing that is time intensive and is done with removed dead tissue.

All around the world, imaging techniques are advancing to assist physicians in seeing with their own eyes the nature of physical ailments that are hidden in the darkness of our bodies. For diagnosis, imaging will continue to be the most invaluable tool available. The amount of information that we can glean from such scans is nothing short of astounding. The cumbersome, time and labour heavy nature of imaging will improve and when paired with software that can help with the diagnosis, we’ll be able to find, track and predict internal processes effortlessly, in order to manage healthcare issues in a streamlined and highly effective way.

Scans courtesy of MARS imaging.

All around the world, imaging techniques are advancing to assist physicians in seeing with their own eyes the nature of physical ailments that are hidden in the darkness of our bodies.

For diagnosis, imaging will continue to be the most invaluable tool available.

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A very exiting step in the industry can be witnessed from quite extraordinary new technology that has made a milestone in healthcare bodily imaging. A company called MARS bioimaging Ltd. in New Zealand has successfully generated the first 3D colour X-Ray images of the human body with a medical scanner.

EU Research

www.euresearcher.com

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