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First ever color X-ray on a human

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Re: First ever color X-ray on a human

#41

Post by lars_thomas »

DINKDINK wrote: post #37
lars_thomas wrote: post #17

Photon counting sensors have been available for quite a while. This is unfortunately not new. It’s not ’color’ it’s multi channel imaging. X-ray tubes produce wide spectrum of x-rays, these type of sensors are able to put different bands to different buckets. Coloring is arbitrary and conveniently chosen in the example to look like visible wavelength response as if the patient was dissected. It does not work for more…

>Coloring is arbitrary By my understanding, it's not possible to determine an objections interaction characteristics with a wavelength of X with a wavelength of Y. (Unless you were able to create some sort of beat frequency tuned to mimic X by sending in Y+delta? Just thinking off the top of my head). It seems fraudulent for the company to say that it's capturing color. >these type of sensors are able to put differen…

Pretty much. Normal x-ray sensors are like camera sensors and produce an estimate of total energy of the photons / pixel. Photon counting sensors are able to estimate how many photons of certain energy range hit the sensor. So instead of value ’1023’ you might get ’63’ of 50kv. So poor mans spectroscopy. Naive way to produce ’color images’ would be to put those buckets to red green and blue channel and now different materials along the beam path might yield equal values with normal x-ray sensors but slightly different colors with photon counting sensors. edit: clarified last sentence

Re: First ever color X-ray on a human

#42

Post by lostlogin »

notadoc wrote: post #22
nathan_f77 wrote: post #7

This feels like a real black swan event to me. I guess I just assumed that black-and-white x-rays were as good as it gets, and that there wasn't any room for improvement. I've never even thought about the idea of a color x-ray. It's very exciting to see something that could change the entire field of radiology.

OsiriX (and others) have been rendering radiology imaging in color and 3D for quite a while. https://www.osirix-viewer.com/osirix/osirix-md/ https://www.osirix-viewer.com/resources/dicom-image-library/ Patients can even download the lite version and review their own images.

> Patients can even download the lite version and review their own images.

This causes radiology companies so much pain. How do you give the images to them when people don’t have CD drives anymore? How do you get them to understand that they aren’t jpgs? How do you get them to a stage where they can open the images (they usually don’t have a Mac)? And the final pain is the last call. “What’s the black thing in the back of the white bit by the edge? Is it cancer?”

Re: First ever color X-ray on a human

#43

Post by Create »

lars_thomas wrote: post #41
DINKDINK wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Coloring is arbitrary By my understanding, it's not possible to determine an objections interaction characteristics with a wavelength of X with a wavelength of Y. (Unless you were able to create some sort of beat frequency tuned to mimic X by sending in Y+delta? Just thinking off the top of my head). It seems fraudulent for the company to say that it's capturing color. >these type of sensors are able to put differen…

Pretty much. Normal x-ray sensors are like camera sensors and produce an estimate of total energy of the photons / pixel. Photon counting sensors are able to estimate how many photons of certain energy range hit the sensor. So instead of value ’1023’ you might get ’63’ of 50kv. So poor mans spectroscopy. Naive way to produce ’color images’ would be to put those buckets to red green and blue channel and now different…

The way "color images" are produced is to map the Hounsfield scale to the visible colour spectrum: i.e. blood red, bone white, steel gray etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hounsfield_units#Value_in_part...

CT machines have this calibrated as standard, DICOM images have the corresponding fields for the values. Any DICOM viewer will do this (i.e. 3D Slicer, ParaView, OsiriX etc.)

As you say, there is nothing new in this, just PR. Medipix also has been around for a while, it's basically a solid state detector with an integrated USB readout on the silicon. Neither has been invented at CERN, its COTS.

Re: First ever color X-ray on a human

#44

Post by jrockway »

Exuma wrote: post #4

This honestly seems like raw black magic. How is this possible?

I mean, all color is is your brain's perception of 3 input channels. Your eye can detect (roughly) the amount of stimulation from blue light, green light, and red light... your brain interprets this as a color.

You can do the same thing for X-rays, or any 3-channel data source.

(Fun fact: because of this, there are colors that your brain can understand but aren't wavelengths of light. Magenta is seen when your blue and red sensors are activated... but there is no single wavelength of light that can do this. Meanwhile, your eye can't tell the difference between monochromatic yellow light, or red and green light being received simultaneously. This is why RGB monitors work, and why you can't represent every color you can see on a computer screen.)

Re: First ever color X-ray on a human

#45

Post by Create »

sloka wrote: post #11

“The new device, based on the traditional black-and-white X-ray, incorporates particle-tracking technology developed for CERN's Large Hadron Collider.” Now i have an easy to understand example to make my skeptical friends understand how CERN’s research benefits us in myriad ways.

Your problem will be, that it is very easy to argue for somebody knowledgeable in the field, that this can be done completely without CERN’s research. Actually, similar stuff has already been done.

Re: First ever color X-ray on a human

#46

Post by lars_thomas »

Create wrote: post #43
lars_thomas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. Normal x-ray sensors are like camera sensors and produce an estimate of total energy of the photons / pixel. Photon counting sensors are able to estimate how many photons of certain energy range hit the sensor. So instead of value ’1023’ you might get ’63’ of 50kv. So poor mans spectroscopy. Naive way to produce ’color images’ would be to put those buckets to red green and blue channel and now different…

The way "color images" are produced is to map the Hounsfield scale to the visible colour spectrum: i.e. blood red, bone white, steel gray etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hounsfield_units#Value_in_part... CT machines have this calibrated as standard, DICOM images have the corresponding fields for the values. Any DICOM viewer will do this (i.e. 3D Slicer, ParaView, OsiriX etc.) As you say, there is nothing new in th…

In this case it’s more than HU value LUT though. Photon counting allows per energy bin attenuation to capture more information. It’s cool and promising but costly and not new per se.

Re: First ever color X-ray on a human

#47

Post by perl4ever »

sloka wrote: post #11

“The new device, based on the traditional black-and-white X-ray, incorporates particle-tracking technology developed for CERN's Large Hadron Collider.” Now i have an easy to understand example to make my skeptical friends understand how CERN’s research benefits us in myriad ways.

There's also the whole World Wide Web thing...

Re: First ever color X-ray on a human

#48

Post by Create »

lars_thomas wrote: post #46
Create wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way "color images" are produced is to map the Hounsfield scale to the visible colour spectrum: i.e. blood red, bone white, steel gray etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hounsfield_units#Value_in_part... CT machines have this calibrated as standard, DICOM images have the corresponding fields for the values. Any DICOM viewer will do this (i.e. 3D Slicer, ParaView, OsiriX etc.) As you say, there is nothing new in th…

In this case it’s more than HU value LUT though. Photon counting allows per energy bin attenuation to capture more information. It’s cool and promising but costly and not new per se.

Agreed. Photon counting has been around in (medical) imaging for ages.

Re: First ever color X-ray on a human

#49

Post by Create »

perl4ever wrote: post #47
sloka wrote: post #11

“The new device, based on the traditional black-and-white X-ray, incorporates particle-tracking technology developed for CERN's Large Hadron Collider.” Now i have an easy to understand example to make my skeptical friends understand how CERN’s research benefits us in myriad ways.

There's also the whole World Wide Web thing...

Are you referring to the stripped down SGML, RPC or hyperlinks? Or the combination? Because all three have been around much before. In many flavours and mixes. The WWW variant’s adoption had more to do with politics than scientific/technical merit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSyfZkVgasI

https://archive.org/details/paulotlet or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLX2OGw31Oo

Re: First ever color X-ray on a human

#50

Post by klipt »

ekun wrote: post #39
lars_thomas wrote: post #17

Photon counting sensors have been available for quite a while. This is unfortunately not new. It’s not ’color’ it’s multi channel imaging. X-ray tubes produce wide spectrum of x-rays, these type of sensors are able to put different bands to different buckets. Coloring is arbitrary and conveniently chosen in the example to look like visible wavelength response as if the patient was dissected. It does not work for more…

Which similar to images we see of space where they have altered detectors' responses from different wavelengths of light to be images in the visible spectrum. So we produce beautiful images, but they aren't accurate to what space would look like to the naked eye.

Probably more useful than the naked eye in many cases. The colors our eyes can see mostly evolved to detect ripe fruit, not diseased tissue.
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