This year, a San Francisco-based
start-up hopes to demonstrate a scanning device that could revolutionise the
diagnosis of cancer and heart disease and, eventually, read our minds. The new
device will do the same job as a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine, but
Openwater, the start-up, promises it will be cheaper and more accurate. Using
infrared light, the handheld gadget can scan five or six inches deep into the
body, reporting what it sees to the focus of a micron (the same size as a
neuron). The tool can be used to spot a tumour by detecting the surrounding
blood vessels and to see where arteries are clogged. One day, it could follow
the flow of oxygenated blood to different areas of the brain, tracking our
thoughts and desires. The device benefits from three scientific breakthroughs.
First, the shrinking of the size of pixels on display screens to almost the
size of the wavelength of light. It can detect small changes in the body and
beam them back at high resolution.
Second, the device makes use of
physics that has been known for 50 years but is only really available in research
labs. This focuses on the ability to assess scattering of light, so it can map
how waves interfere with each other. Thirdly, developments in neuroscience help
us understand where the brain is active by looking at where the oxygenated
blood flows. Researchers have already been able to use MRI to guess what people
are looking at. The University of California, Berkeley paid graduate students
to lie in MRI machines and watch YouTube videos for hundreds of hours, watching
how their brains behaved depending on what they saw. Then, it showed the
students new video clips and was able to roughly replicate the images they saw.
Openwater is aiming to show brain activity at a far higher level of detail making
this kind of mind-reading more precise. If the company can produce a
mass-market consumer product, it would also give neuroscientists far more data
for building brain maps.
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