Sunday, January 27, 2013

The Power of Interdisciplinary Research - Astronomy and Medicine

Here's an interesting vid:



This video is an example of how interdisciplinary work can benefit two seemingly different fields. How could medicine be used to help astronomy (and vice-versa)? The idea of this video is to show how doctors use visual and segmentation techniques to search data and understand the course of disease. This is beneficial to astronomers as they have less advance tools to analyze their sky surveys and visualize their data. However, according to Harvard's IIC archive, astronomers are better able to share information with large group of scientists which could also benefit medicine.

Medical imaging is used to take non-invasive images inside the human body for diagnostic purposes. An example would be x-rays. Astronomical imaging (Astrophotography) is the recording of images through long time exposure to accumulate photons. It is essentially a huge camera, and to aim this camera requires the use of astronomical coordinates like right ascension, etc. One method is the use of X-rays to find objects like neutron stars or black holes (since the material being sucked in emit x-rays - perhaps more on that later...).

Seeing that both disciplines use imaging technologies and both need accurate x-ray pictures, it would be obvious to have an interdisciplinary team for the advancement research and medicine. For more on the subject, here are some links:

1) http://lhcb.ecm.ub.es/spd/pmt/Other%20sources/MedAstro.pdf
2) http://iic.seas.harvard.edu/research/astronomical-medicine

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