this could be a big life saver if it’s small, cheap and safe enough for doctors offices to have so they can triage patients and quickly refer them to hospital when needed rather than having to book an appointment for a scan. Could even become a standard part of a routine medical check-up to test for signs of aortic aneurysms or similar, that could be a huge life saver.
from what they say i wonder if it’ll be useful tied to a machine able to do near-autonomous endovascular surgery? that could really help reduce surgery wait times and improve a lot of peoples lives.
Very exciting.
Phone friendlier links: Archive.ph, Archive.org
Just wish I hadn’t opened that site in Safari on iPhone first, putting it in reader mode crashed it so hard I had to restart my phone.
> Such nanoparticles do not occur naturally in the human body and must be administered as markers
So if I’m reading this right, much like radioactive markers, these must be surgically implanted before they can capture the imaging? In other words, it’s not a direct replacement for MRI or X-ray imaging technologies, though it could potentially be safer for long term care patients that need frequent imaging.
Not implanted, just injected into a vessel with a needle or catheter. Any time you introduce something like this into the blood though, there are consequences. X-Ray contrast reactions can be lethal and MRI contrast (more similar to these since it’s metal-based) occasionally kills the arteries going to kidneys, which is bad. So, it’s easy to administer, but this is far too soon to claim it is safe at scale.
I had a CT scan after an accident, and no one told me what contrast is going to feel like, the nurse simply injected me without any explanation.
And omfg, that might’ve been one of the scariest 30 seconds of my life. It felt like I was injected with straight up lava. My whole body was burning from the inside, and I felt like I would just spontaneously combust any second. It very quickly subsided though and there was no negative reaction overall, just higher sensitivity than average. But holy shit, I would want to know about stuff like this beforehand.
What’s new? We’ve had such technology for decades, and at a very cheap price too! /s
hasn’t the efficacy of this been called into question?
apparently, as a test, they scanned a business czar’s chest. it showed nothing.
then they scanned a politician’s head. again, nothing.
