3D Printing With Tomography in Reverse

The 3D printers we’re most familiar with use the fused deposition process, in which hot plastic is squirted out of a nozzle, to build up parts on a layer by layer basis. We’ve also seen stereolithography printers, such as the Form 2, which use a projector and a special resin to produce parts, again in a layer-by-layer method. However, a team from the University of North Carolina were inspired by CT scanners, and came up with a novel method for producing 3D printed parts.

The technique is known as Computed Axial Lithography. The team describe the system as working like …read more

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The Use and Abuse Of CT Scanners

David Mills is as a research scientist at the cutting edge of medical imaging. His work doesn’t involve the scanners you might find yourself being thrust into in a hospital should you be unfortunate enough to injure yourself. He’s working with a higher grade of equipment, he pushes the boundaries of the art with much smaller, very high resolution CT scanners for research at a university dental school.

He’s also a friend of Hackaday and we were excited for his talk on interesting uses for CT scanners at EMF Camp this summer. David takes us into that world with history …read more

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MRI to 3D Print Gets Much Faster

A surprising use of 3D printing has been in creating life-like models of human body parts using MRI or CT scans. Surgeons and other medical professionals can use models to plan procedures or assist in research. However, there has been a problem. The body is a messy complex thing and there is a lot of data that comes out of a typical scan. Historically, someone had to manually identify structures on each slice — a very time-consuming process — or set a threshold value and hope for the best. A recent paper by a number of researchers around the globe …read more

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Visible Light CT Scanner Does Double Duty

If you’ve ever experienced the heartbreak of finding a seed in your supposedly seedless navel orange, you’ll be glad to hear that with a little work, you can protect yourself with an optical computed tomography scanner to peer inside that slice before popping it into your mouth.

We have to admit to reading this one with a skeptical eye at first. It’s not that we doubt that a DIY CT scanner is possible; after all, we’ve seen examples at least a couple of times before. The prominent DSLR mounted to the scanning chamber betrays the use of visible light rather …read more

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Can a CT scan be hacked? New research pushes doctors to patch their imaging devices

Health care providers and manufacturers of medical imaging devices (MIDs) need to be more vigilant when it comes to protecting their equipment, researchers from Ben-Gurion University say in a new research paper. The paper, published this month, details how researchers found that the devices are particularly vulnerable to threats that can ultimately result in harm to patients. “MIDs are increasingly connected to hospital networks, making them vulnerable to sophisticated cyber-attacks targeting the devices’ infrastructure and components, which can disrupt digital patient records, and potentially jeopardize patients’ health,” the paper’s abstract says. At particular risk are computed tomography (CT) machines because of their widespread use in acute care imaging, the researchers say. The researchers simulated cyberattacks on machines that conduct CT scans and their host computers and came away with several major risks. By gaining access to the configuration files on a CT machine’s host computer, hackers can change the way a […]

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