Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Advancing imaging techniques to aid detection

One of my dreams, and I am sure there are a lot of people who have this dream -- is to build a booth. Once you walk into it, a million scanners run over your body. They examine your genes, your morphology and other markers in your body. They run a health report - past, present and future.

They indicate the health conditions that currently afflict you, and what risks you run for the future. Treatments can then start immediately.

A step closer to this, would be techniques similar to the one reported by researchers at Dartmouth. They are using the differences between oxygenation and deoxygenation of blood to try and identify breast cancer tumors. Having worked with sensory distinction of deoxygenated blood from oxygenated blood, I feel this has a lot of promise.

While the woods may be dark, deep and there might be a million steps to go in medical diagnostics research, this is a good step forward!

No comments: