Vibrating Technology Promises to Replace Biopsies in Diagnosing Diseased Tissue

Scientists at the Mayo Clinic have developed a new way to "see" into the body by using vibrations, it is called magnetic resonance elastography (MRE). It sends vibrations into the body that can be picked up by a modified MRI machine. The tissues in the body move only microns due to these vibrations, but by applying advanced mathematical models to the data doctors and scientists can make an image of the body. It was inspired by the fact that doctors can diagnose a lot of things just by feeling the patients body that advanced imaging techniques cannot pick up. The doctors are feeling the relative densities in the body when they do this, and the MRE does the same thing with the vibrations. This should make diagnosing certain things much easier, like detecting liver disease.

I found this article very interesting because medical imaging is directly related to Biomedical Engineering, and because advancements like these can vastly improve a patient's life and can make the doctor's job much easier.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=magnetic-resonance-elastography

Scott Eagleston
VTPP 434-502