New technologies to visualize narrowed airways

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Two groups of researchers, one in the United States and one in Australia, are announcing the development of new optical techniques for visualizing the invisible processes at work in several human diseases.

The published results are the first to showcase the Optical Society's (OSA) Interactive Science Publishing (ISP) initiative, which allows authors to submit a manuscript that includes large three-dimensional data and gives researchers, scientists and engineers a way to evaluate new research results more thoroughly.

Described in upcoming issues of Optics Express, the OSA's open-access journal, and in Journal of the Optical Society of America A (JOSA A), one of these techniques may help clinicians diagnose and treat people with breathing disorders. The other can show three-dimensional structure and the blood flow mechanism at the earliest stages of heart development.

The research takes advantage of ISP, an initiative undertaken by OSA in partnership with the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, and with the support of the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research. This initiative allows scientists to expand upon traditional research results by providing software for interactively viewing underlying source data and to objectively compare the performance of different technologies. This data may be related to medical images, such as those taken with X-rays, MRIs, CT scans and ultrasounds, or it may be created in research involving oil and gas exploration, climatology, pollution monitoring and many other fields.-Optical Society of America

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