Medical Breakthrough: World's 1st Full Body Scanner Can Scan You From Head To Toe In 1 Second

There was a time when doctors were thrilled at being able to render 3D ultrasounds of patients. Now, researchers have outdone themselves once again, having just managed to produce the first 3D full body scan using a new high-tech medical scanner.

Image courtesy: Lisa Howard/UC Davis

The device is the result of work by UC Davis scientists Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi. Explorer, as it's called, uses a combination of positron emission tomography (PET) and X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanners.

It doesn't just generate a scan of the entire body at once though. Because it's so much more effective at capturing radiation, Explorer can produce a 3D image of a patient's internals in as little as one second. The applications it could have in medical diagnostics is huge, according to the developers, including for things like tracking a disease's progression as well as researching the effects and efficiency of new medical therapies.

"While I had imagined what the images would look like for years, nothing prepared me for the incredible detail we could see on that first scan," Cherry said in a statement. "While there is still a lot of careful analysis to do, I think we already know that Explorer is delivering roughly what we had promised."

Bhadawi was similarly taken aback by the scale of the images their machine could make. "The level of detail was astonishing, especially once we got the reconstruction method a bit more optimized," he said. "We could see features that you just don't see on regular PET scans."

Though widely used right now, PET and CT scans usually focus on a particular region of the body. Explorer however can scan the entire body, in a fraction of the time, and with less radiation involved.

Because it's so fast, doctors can also use Explorer to take multiple consecutive scans of a patient's body, and make a sort of stop-motion movie tracking how specially tagged drugs move through their system.

The university built the device in partnership with United Imaging Healthcare, and the first system is installed at the Explorer Imaging Center in Sacramento. And if all goes according to plan, doctors and researchers could hopefully begin using it as early as June next year.