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IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology

Physicists Try to Revive a Super-Safe, Decades-Old Cancer Treatment

• Wired by Sophia Chen

At first glance, they look like they've been lopped off the top of department store mannequins. But they're more lifelike than that—made of materials that mimic bone, flesh, and brain. "One of them even has a gold filling," he says.

For the last six years, Johnson, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been working on a machine that shoots protons through the human skull. His goal: to use protons instead of conventional X-rays to take 3-D images inside cancer patients. But first, he has to perfect the technology on his model skulls.

His prototype can map the dummy's head in about six minutes. It can find the gold filling inside the dummy's mouth. And most importantly, it can recognize a tumor. While his machine isn't yet good enough to make a diagnosis—X-ray images still have better resolution—that's not the point. Johnson thinks that a proton-based image, even a blurry one, can guide a cancer treatment known as proton therapy better than a conventional X-ray.


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