Peter of TricorderProject writes:
I’ve been thinking about tomographic imaging a lot lately in between nursing sore fingers from learning how to hand-wind electromagnetic coils for my attempt at a small prepolarized coded-field MRI, and I thought I’d take a moment to share some progress.
The open source computed tomography (CT) scanner that I put together last year was a lot of fun to design, having many atypical design problems in it, from the mechanical design of the rotary gantry to pairing an appropriate radioisotope source with a modified extra-sensitive radiation sensor. Something about it being essentially a radioactive desktop Stargate that lets you see inside of things also seems to get people very excited, and so I’ve received an eclectic bunch of e-mails asking about the scanner from folks as diverse as radiology professors and biomedical folks to makers to those hoping I’d open up Dr. Jansen’s back-alley CT scans to have a look at some strange bump they have (please go see your doctor!). But I feel that for all the excitement, to quote Feynman, the current open CT design feels a bit like a dog that walks on two legs — it’s not that it does it well, it’s that it does it at all.
Project info at TricorderProject.