by
Aine Cryts, Contributing Reporter | November 27, 2015
The health impact of this research could be far-reaching, said Schaff. “We believe that our method can play an important role in two ways: First, it can help understand diseases that affect and change the nanomorphology of parts of the human body. Second, it can be used to aid and guide the process of developing synthetic materials that try and imitate materials found in the human body.”
What’s next for Schaff and the rest of his research team? “We have shown that it is possible to perform imaging in the proposed way,” he said. “The next step would be to increase the performance of the technology — namely, reducing the amount of time needed for a scan, increasing the field of view and resolution. This will allow studies to be conducted with a larger number of investigated objects.”
He noted that his research team’s method was not intended to perform imaging on a living patient. Rather, it provides an opportunity to better understand materials (such as the inside of a tooth). To that end, Schaff doesn’t anticipate any delays to this research by regulatory authorities in the United States or elsewhere.
The European research team’s findings were published in
Nature on November 19.
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