https://home.cern/about/updates/2018...ern-technology
Just goes to show what can come of doing research in to things with no obvious immediate benefit. A good kick in the teeth to all those Luddites who say why so and so research is a waste of time and they should be working on a cure for cancer etc. Well here you go a development directly derived from building the large hadron collider, which will help detect cancer among many other things.
CAT-THE-FIFTH (13-07-2018),DavidM (14-07-2018),peterb (14-07-2018),Saracen (14-07-2018),watercooled (13-07-2018)
Wow!!
I assume such people are just ignorant and in roughly the same group who patronisingly label academics as 'boffins' in the media. TBH nowadays it seems like people are considered weird if they're passionate about something that isn't sport or Netflix. The amount of genuine, original, science-related videos which are taken down from Youtube for being classed as 'dangerous acts' (compared to other actually dangerous acts which are left alone) backs that up, and is quite depressing.
We don't need science or research, we're quite happy with our smartphones! /s
It doesn't help that a good chunk of the journalists reporting on science-related matters in the mainstream media don't have the faintest idea what they're talking about, while any true academics being interviewed are more or less forced to dumb down what they're saying into baby words and remove any remotely scientific information or scary words like 'chemical' and 'nuclear'. People probably don't respect science because they can't see this link between research and end results - products are just magically created in one guy's mind, probably at Apple!
TBH with the way 'science' is presented in the media equally alongside half-truths, pseudo-science and plain old nonsense, it probably shouldn't have come as a surprise to me recently when one person said how 'not all science is true, some is obviously made up, like how do they really know planets are that far away - no-one's ever measured them, have they?' Unless they actually go to the effort of *thinking* about things (imagine how hard that would be!!!), you can understand why people can't tell nonsense apart from the scientific method.
/rant (thanks for the excuse to go off on a tangent and get something off my chest!)
So how is this working? Is it determining how "deep" the particles or err waves, thus able to detect it's frequency? Kind of like the Foveon?
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
Well, according to the article ...Originally Posted by TheAnimus
It's not obvious how much it relies on detection of x-ray penetration vs x-ray scatter, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a combined technique - I don't really see any other way of getting decent 3D imagery without a large number of exposures, which you'd want to avoid when messing with x-rays. But it's fairly intuitive to see how a combined measurement of penetration energy and scatter energy could give you a fairly comprehensive image, particularly if you're using highly sensitive detectors that can handle minute variations in energy level.... The colours represent different energy levels of the X-ray photons as recorded by the detector and hence identifying different components of body parts such as fat, water, calcium, and disease markers. ...
If I understood it properly, it's not so much a 3D x-ray image, as a 3D computer-generated image, based on high-resolution images, with extremely accurate x-ray particle counts that can identify the type of matter being x-rayed. In that sense, it's a bit like airport x-ray scanners identifying metal, plastic,irganic matter, etc, inside a suitcase.
As I understood it, that's the novel step, the way the x-ray data is used to computer-generate the 3D image, rather than capturing the 3D image.
But however it works, it looks like it could be a phenomenally useful tool.
Yeah I imagine the colours are chosen by the operator (or perhaps if the software recognises bone, tissue, etc) and the image coloured in post-processing. CT scans already basically do the 3D part.
I think that was what was confusing me, this is "faked" colour based on the substance it thinks it's looking at, makes more sense that way.
I did spend a rather long time thinking how in the hell you could get "real" colour....
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
Again, as I read it, it's not just the colour that's computer-generated, but the 3D too.
I mean, unlike a 3D laser scanner scanner a 3D object, this appears to be a 2D x-ray, BUT with sufficiently high pixel density, AND each pixel being sufficiently accurate in it's ability to particle-count, that they can take that high level of data and work out what it means. The software then generates a 3D colour representation.
If so, it's a combination of some very advanced and accurate x-ray hardware, and some extremely clever software, working .... erm .... 'hand' in glove, as it were.
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