Skip to Content
77 Mass Ave

Now See This

New x-ray system could image soft tissues.
February 18, 2014

X-rays are a crucial tool of medicine, but to image the body’s soft tissues they generally require contrast-enhancing agents that must be swallowed or injected, and their resolution is limited. But researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have come up with a new approach that could dramatically change that, providing the most detailed images ever—including clear views of soft tissue without contrast agents.

x-ray of a human wrist
A sample x-ray of a human wrist demonstrates a new system’s ability to reveal very fine details.

The new technology could be smaller and cheaper than conventional systems, says Luis Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories. It could also deliver higher resolution and reduce patients’ radiation exposure. The key is to produce coherent beams of x-rays from an array of micrometer-size point sources instead of a spread of beams from a single large point, as in conventional systems.

Velásquez-García says the technology would provide a unique view of the body’s organ systems. A simulation of the new system that the team performed with an eye from a cadaver clearly showed “all the structures, the lens, and the cornea,” he says.

Adapting hardware developed for microchip manufacturing, the researchers produced a nanostructured surface with an array of tiny tips, each of which can emit a beam of electrons. These, in turn, pass through a microstructured plate that emits a beam of x-rays. The resulting coherent beam is equivalent to something that can now be produced only by “incredibly expensive” systems at linear particle accelerators, Velásquez-García says. Those facilities were the first to demonstrate the diagnostic power of coherent beams—for example, revealing a cancerous tumor by showing the blood vessels supplying it.

“You can’t have a linear accelerator in every hospital,” he says. But the new system could potentially improve the resolution of conventional x-ray imagery by a factor of 100 with hardware that costs orders of magnitude less, he says.

The technology could also be applied beyond medicine. For example, it could be useful in airport baggage screening, differentiating a bottle of shampoo from a container of explosives.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.