By Peter Weiss
U.S. and British scientists have devised a gentle way to peer inside living flesh. They use holograms.
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The laser-based method eventually may enable doctors to dispense with tissue biopsies on or near external and internal body surfaces, says team leader David D. Nolte of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. Instead, physicians might opt to investigate questionable growths by means of surgery-free, video explorations–”fly-throughs,” as the researchers call them. A system that slices a 3-D hologram into flat images would generate the movie.