My pal and IFTF colleague Jake Dunagan spotted this amazing image in an older post on the excellent Cocktail Party Physics. The doll is wearing a diffuse optical tomography (DOT) rig, an emerging technology used to scan an infant's brain using light. From Cocktail Party Physics:
Light passes out of one fiber optic cable, diffuses through the tissue, and is received by another cable. Yes, light does diffuse through tissue, as anyone who has ever held a flashlight up to his hand can attest. According to Joseph Culver, an assistant professor of radiology at WUSTL, "The flashlight's white light becomes visibly reddened because there's a window in the near-IR region of the spectrum where human tissue absorbs relatively little of the light." Anyway, based on this diffusion data, the machine's computer creates a 3D tomographic image based on whether the hemoglobin in the blood is oxygenated or deoxygenated to determine brain activity.
