web.mit.edu — Medical lasers are like science fiction heat rays that can vaporize tumors. The problem has been getting the lasers to where they are needed inside the body while protecting healthy tissue.Now "perfect mirror" technology, developed by MIT researchers, is being used to shoot a laser through a spaghetti-thin, flexible fiber to attack tumors...
Apr 5, 2006 View in Crawl 4
marcme222Apr 6, 2006
A colleague of mine is actually working on something like this -- it's basically a machine which spins around the patient, with a radiation beam shooting out of a shape-changing lead window. The "moving window" runs on an math (optimization) algorithm to maximize the radiation being sent to the tumor, while minimizing damage to healthy cells.
ugm2099Apr 6, 2006
good thing Digg makes it easy to block users. see ya later.
Closed AccountApr 6, 2006
The doctor is wearing glasses.
aeontorporApr 6, 2006
@MinosI bet you didn't know that "pure water" is a diarrhetic.:D happy hunting.P.S. diarrhetic isn't in the digg spell checker
aveyuenApr 6, 2006
@boulooo & alkel:Good point. I feel somewhat ashamed that I didn't pick up on that earlier. alkel, you're right about the high bending (i've seen papers with 120 degree bends with 1um radius of curvature). If you're interested, check out the original paper by Mekis et al: “High Transmission through Sharp Bends in Photonic Crystal Waveguides”, Physical Review Letters, vol. 77, n. 18, 1996.also, interestingly, it is not the fact that the PhC has low defects that allow them to be perfect mirrors. It is the fact that the periodicity of the dielectric contrast is such that, when solving Maxwell's equations for a propagating mode, they cannot exist inside the crystal. In essence, the waveguide is the 'defect' in the crystal itself, because that is the only place where that photon is allowed.
alkelApr 6, 2006
That makes sense... thanks for the explanation :-)