Brilliance CT 256-Slice Scanner from Philips Gets to the Heart of the Problem

Philips recently unveiled their 256-slice scanner that renders 3-D images of the body like never before. The $2-million Brilliance CT machine can capture the body's skeleton, organs and blood vessels in the minutest of detail, and was unveiled recently in Chicago, at the Radiological Society of North America's annual meeting.Philips' scanner can give a patient a full body scan in less than a minute — and exposes them to 80 per cent less radiation than a traditional X-ray machine. The machine scans the body as well as rotating around it, sending out 256 pulses every one-third of a second. It is so powerful that it can capture an unblurred image of an entire heart in less than two heartbeats.The machine could prove useful in the battle against cancer. As well as picking up tumors in the body, the scanner should be able to show medics how the disease spreads and new patterns of abnormality.

Japanese Doctors Using Wii Fit to Help You Stop Being Fat

Nintendo has partnered with NEC, Panasonic and Hitachi to put together a system that actual doctors will use to check up on actual patients, using a Wii Fit.

The add-on is a special channel for the Wii, called the "Health Checkup Channel", that provides two-way communication between doctors and their patients. For the doctors, the system is essentially a readout of whatever information Wii Fit collects, presented over time and in the context of the patient's medical history, which I would assume he or she would be privy to. For the patient, the experience is much like the vanilla Wii Fit, except with a real-life doctor feeding you personalized guidance.

Inkjet Cartridges To Save Your Kidneys

Sometimes it's hard to remember that inkjet printers are good for anything other than ripping you off, but news today from HP's own intellectual property czar may change that: the technology that regulates the precise mixture of pigments down to the last picoliter will soon make home kidney dialysis machines more accurate by regulating mixtures of dialysis fluid with similar accuracy.

People with kidney problems often have to undergo dialysis treatments several times per day, so doing so at home is a necessity; unfortunately, home dialysis is prone to errors because the dialysis solution must be mixed precisely, often at varying concentrations. The HP-licensed inkjet tech will allow for dialysis solution to come in easy-to-swap cartridges that handle precise mixtures automatically. OK, you're off the hook for now, HP. For now.

Amazing DSI Brain Scanning Visualizes Your Mind's Inner Workings In 3D

What's that monkey thinking about when he's mushing down that banana or tossing feces at you? Well, you're looking at it—this is a map of where a macaque's thoughts live. It's made possible by new 3D visualization algorithms developed by neuroscientists at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston which render a brain's billions of individual neuron connections in full-color 3D, with each visible strand representing several tens of thousands of the too-small-to-image neural pathways. It's all done by simply applying new processing to existing MRI scan data, and thankfully, it works on human brains too.

The tech, called diffusion spectrum imaging, takes current data from MRI scans and analyzes it for the passage of water molecules along the individual neuron connections in the brain. It then processes it to spit out the 3D maps. It's possible to do on live subjects (like the human brain image above), but more detail can be achieved by scanning non-living samples for up to 24 hours.

Doctors are using the new images to better understand our brain's infinitely complicated wiring, and to avoid important neural nets during surgeries.