Using visible light for early detection of breast cancer is cool and all, but it isn't new. I and two friends did graduate work on this very subject back in the early 1990s. We weren't the first, of course. You can figure that out by searching for "dianography" and seeing how many hits you get. Still pretty cool, though. One of us worked on the research documents, another on the electronics and the last (me) got to do the programming. I never finished and my work was picked up and improved upon by my friend, which turned out to be his master's thesis work. Also, it had to be changed from breast cancer to cavity detection. What can I say? The dental school had more money to give us.

There was one category that we honed in on: some breast cancers are undetectable by X-rays, but can be found via the visible light method. I'm fairly certain that this is where the impetus for this research lies. In any event, I'm hopeful that this cancer, among others, will eventually be eradicated. And that date cannot come quickly enough.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 12:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 196 words, total size 1 kb.