Making sense of medical sensors
With the recent launch of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, MIT News examines research with the potential to reshape medicine and health care through new scientific knowledge, novel treatments and products, better management of medical data, and improvements in health-care delivery. Medical radiography is basically a species of photography. Historically, the patient’s limb would be positioned between an x-ray source and a photographic plate. The plate would be exposed and developed, and the result was an image of the limb’s interior.Today, most larger x-ray machines use digital sensors rather than photographic film, but otherwise, little has changed. The raw data captured by the sensors is easily interpretable as a visual image. That’s not true of more recent imaging technologies, however. In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), for instance, different types of electromagnetic signals are individually...