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The first 3D color X-rays

Tom Scott | December 16, 2025



At the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand, the team at Mars Bioimaging are using detector equipment originally developed for the Large Hadron Collider, and putting it to a very different use: medical imaging that allows 3D, false-color images inside the human body.

Thanks to the Mars Bioimaging team: https://www.marsbioimaging.com/

Edited by Michelle Martin https://www.youtube.com/@OnTheCrux
Audio mix by Graham Haerther https://haerther.net/

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Written by Tom Scott

Comments

This post currently has 21 comments.

  1. @TomScottGo

    December 16, 2025 at 12:53 am

    There's a line in here that goes by very quickly, but to be clear: that little X-ray sensor measures the frequency of each individual photon that hits each pixel. It's an offshoot of tech from the Large Hadron Collider.

  4. @adrianadrian2735

    December 16, 2025 at 12:53 am

    I think that storing parts of the scan on a machine made to store the data on a large number of high transfer rate RAM sticks to be later rendered as a whole by the machine, would be a cheap way of dealing with data storage issues reliably.

    In my idea, the scan-data could be quickly stored in and spread between many high transfer rate RAM modules on a machine or a series of machines, the machine then would take the data saved on the modules and, slowly, over time, save it bit-by-bit within the constraints of a conventional storage device's transfer-rates (such as Hard or Solid State Drives), this minimises the exposure time during scan whilst also retaining the data, as during the short-time of the scan, all the scan-data could be quickly "absorbed" by the much higher transfer rate RAM (kind of like a sponge), allowing it to later be "drained" slowly into a whole on a conventional storage device.

    Wishing all the best and hope this helps someone at some point perhaps.

  7. @RD9_Designs

    December 16, 2025 at 12:53 am

    That's great to know! Thanks Tom! But I can't imagine the googley eyes give anyone comfort when they just serve to make you think that you are going into it's mouth!

  10. @backpacker9131

    December 16, 2025 at 12:53 am

    Super interesting. I’m glad I stumbled upon this channel… question though, if MRI’s are the current best way of getting a detailed image of the body for doctors/patients, would this replace MRI’s or be used in conjunction with one another? And how much radiation would be at risk of getting from this compared to what we have currently?

  17. @TheRisky9

    December 16, 2025 at 12:53 am

    I wonder if this will help detecting things like damaged tissue or hematomas. For example, it can help when people claim they were injured in an accident, but we can show that they weren't.

Comments are closed.

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