Rendering Ultrasonic Imagery: The Sonic Flashlight

Effugas writes: "Fark pointed me at this brilliantly elegant new invention, the Sonic Flashlight. From the curious workshop of George Stetten, an ultrasonic scan of the inside of a patient's body is visually overlaid perceptually within the body being scanned, with no requirement for special glasses, viewing angles, or even particularly exotic hardware. How? Form a triangle with an ultrasound platform and its output display--then bisect the triangle with a half transparent(see the body below), half reflective(see the display above) pane of glass. Since the angles match, the two images merge to provide a perfectly placed synthesis of reality and its augmentation, irrespective of viewer position. Watch the video here for a demonstration; note the hand held variant at the bottom of the page as well. Slick!"

X-Ray replacement?

[zoward]

There are unsafe levels of x-ray radation that one is not supposed to be exposed to over the course of one's life. Many chronically ill people bump into that limit. Depending on the clinical effectiveness of this, the sonic flashlight could become the x-ray machine's safer, cheaper brother, although my guess is that, like MRI or CT scans, it will augment rather than replace many of the imaging methods currently in use.

Slick? yes. Patentable? I hope not.

[dpbsmith]

Check out H. Steinhaus's classical book, "Mathematical Snapshots, New Edition, Enlarged and Revised," 1960, Oxford University Press, New York, Library of Congress catalog #60-5104. You'll see an extremely similar idea shown on p. 172-176, figures 174-176. "The idea described here has been used to localize foreign bodies in the human body. For this purpose X rays are applied... the surgeon seees a picture similar to the photograph (174); looking through the [partially reflective] glass he sees the patient's skin, but he also sees the bulb exactly at the place occupied [by the object he's trying to surgically remove.]"

The only real difference is the subsitution of a real-time ultrasonic display for an X-ray.

I dunno how patent law works these days, but it would seem as if there's a pretty significant piece of prior art. That's a 1960 revised edition of a book originally published in 1950; I don't know whether or not this description is in the 1950 edition.

The technique, of course, has been used by magicians for stage effects for over a century, and is one of the main techniques used to produce the illusions in the the Disney "Haunted Mansion" (which many people believe incorrectly to be holograms).

Re:Cute, but how useful in medical applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

This message is for those who doubt the usefulness of this invention. I was lucky enought to see Doctor Stetten's PhD defense at UNC (he already had an MD). His research involves diagnosing heart problems quickly with ultrasound.

>In most medical uses, it's important to be able >to change the angle at which the ultrasound image >is taken. Like CAT scans, ultrasound takes images >of anatomy in slices.
This used to be true, but now we have 3dimensional ultrasound, which you can't really see from the video. The advantage is immediate diagnosis. Where CT scans cost hundreds of dollars and take hours to plan and schedule, ultrasound is cheap and fast.

This goes much further, however. I work in cancer radiation treatment. A huge problem we have is matching the CT scan to the patient when the treatment is being done. This device has the potential to let technicians place the patient perfectly on the treatment table. This could really affect the survival rate of patients.

For Dr. Stetten, his invention means that he can tell if a patient has a blocked artery without surgery. Slashdotters, remember that just because _you_ can't think of the application, doesn't mean there isn't one. Doctors don't have time to waste inventing devices without use. They create things that are directly applicable to what they do.