Medical imaging is a set of diagnostic techniques that noninvasively visualize internal anatomical structures and physiological processes using diverse physical modalities. Core methods include ionizing-radiation–based techniques (e.g., radiography, computed tomography, nuclear medicine, PET/SPECT), non-ionizing modalities (e.g., MRI, ultrasound, optical imaging), and hybrid systems (e.g., PET/CT, PET/MRI). These techniques exploit contrasts in tissue density, proton properties, acoustic impedance, or radiotracer distribution to generate qualitative and quantitative data. Medical imaging underpins clinical decision-making, image-guided interventions, treatment planning, and longitudinal monitoring, and increasingly incorporates advanced reconstruction algorithms, quantitative biomarkers, and AI-driven image analysis.
When doctors and scientists want to see inside a body, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a powerful tool. MRI can noninvasively capture detailed images of the body's muscles, organs, and bones. It can monitor blood flow ...
Bio & Medicine
20 hours ago
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Every year, about 85,000 Americans are diagnosed with bladder cancer. While treatment is often successful, bladder cancer has one of the highest rates of recurrence of any cancer: Following treatment, about 50% of patients ...
Bio & Medicine
21 hours ago
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Medications are designed to treat diseased tissues while sparing healthy ones, often by attaching the drug to something that helps guide it directly to its target. But drugs also need time to work, which means they need to ...
Bio & Medicine
May 13, 2026
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Whether in tooth enamel or in nanomaterials made of silicon, the orientation of tiny internal structures often determines the properties of a material. A new X-ray method can even make this nano-order visible when the structures ...
Optics & Photonics
May 12, 2026
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Researchers at National Jewish Health have published new findings demonstrating that short-duration spaceflight may not significantly impact lower extremity joint structures, while also identifying a promising, noninvasive ...
Space Exploration
May 8, 2026
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Malignant tumor treatment remains a major challenge due to the limited precision and significant side effects. Copper-based single-atom nanozymes have shown promise for tumor microenvironment-responsive precision therapy, ...
Bio & Medicine
Apr 29, 2026
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A rainbow reveals with colors what otherwise remains hidden: light is "refracted" by transparent matter, in this case water droplets. This same physical effect underlies many everyday technologies, like LCD screens and broadband ...
Optics & Photonics
Apr 27, 2026
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MIT researchers discovered a paradoxical phenomenon in optical physics that could enable a new bioimaging method that's faster and higher-resolution than existing technology. They discovered that, under the right conditions, ...
Optics & Photonics
Apr 27, 2026
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Imaging is a critical technique in biology—from identifying cancerous cells in biopsies to observing how immune cells like macrophages hunt down and destroy pathogens. Traditionally, distinguishing and labeling individual ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 20, 2026
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A new analytical method could improve how cancer treatments are designed—by allowing scientists to track, for the first time, exactly where inside a living cell a drug accumulates. Researchers from the University of Surrey ...
Biotechnology
Apr 15, 2026
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