Google Maps for the Body

Google Maps for the Body

The ability to zoom in from outer space all the way through countries, cities, streets and finally looking through the windows of a house has been available on Google Maps for some time.

On Sunday, biomedical engineer Professor Melissa Knothe Tate unveiled the work her team at UNSW has undertaken to be able to look at a hip joint from standing right next to it, all the way down the cells inside tissues and zoom back and forth 'just as you would with Google Maps.'

The Australian team took apart the Google Maps app and applied the algorithms to the body, allowing researchers to see a whole new world. The Australian team at UNSW have forged relationships with the US based Cleveland Clinic as well as Stanford University, Google and Zeiss, a German, high tech optical and industrial measurement manufacturer to help sort and crunch terabytes of data from hip studies to produce the pioneering tool.

'For the first time we have the ability to go from the whole body down to how the cells are getting their nutrition and how this is all connected,' said Professor Knothe Tate. 'This could open the door to as yet unknown new therapies and preventions.' Expensive and less accurate MRI scans could become obsolete as development in the new technology advances.

“MRI is the equivalent of looking at the map of the United States or a map of Europe, where you see the individual country borders,”

Knothe Tate's work was revealed at a Las Vegas conference in Orthopedics but the opportunities for all areas of medicine are clear. This is the first time the work has been done on humans. Studies to map the neural pathways of mice have been taking place in Heidelberg, Germany and Harvard University.

All this from a conversation on a bus between Knothe Tate and a friend who worked at Zeiss about a top secret, microscopic imaging system, developed by Zeiss to scan the quality of silicon chips used by electronics.

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