Advances

(Advances gives a glimpse of the many significant research projects at the university. Tell us about your discoveries by e-mailing: wisweek@news.wisc.edu.)

Souping up MRI
Magnetic resonance imaging is a powerful diagnostic tool that lets doctors peer deep inside the human body. However, its pace can be slow, with each image taking many seconds or minutes to build.

Now a team of researchers led by medical physicist Charles Mistretta has patented a suite of technologies that promise to soup up MRI, making it speedy enough to catch fleeting events during procedures like angiography, while creating exceptionally vivid, three-dimensional images with less background interference.

These more nimble MRI techniques will mean fewer uncomfortable minutes inside scanners for patients and much quicker access to high-quality diagnostic images for physicians, Mistretta says. Mistretta and his colleagues can construct images much faster, without skimping on quality.

With the help of his technology, MRI should completely replace more risky X-ray approaches to angiography, Mistretta says.The new technologies provide virtually endless possibilities for applications, such as motion-correcting algorithms for times when patients squirm in the scanner.

Appetite for mozzarella spurs cheesy technology
America’s appetite for pizza and other dishes that depend on the incomparable stretch-minded mozzarella cheese has soared in the last 20 years.

Now, university scientists have perfected a new process that eliminates some of the production hassle and specialized equipment required to make mozzarella. The upshot, they hope, will be ample supplies of a cheese whose popularity shows no signs of diminishing, says Carol Chen, a UW–Madison food scientist.

“Essentially, we’ve cut out the mixing, molding and brining steps, and we still have a cheese with functionality similar to that of traditional pasta-filata-style mozzarella cheese,” says Chen, who, with fellow food scientist Mark Johnson, has patented the new mozza-making method.

The technology could be a boon to cheese-makers who can now ramp up mozzarella production with the same equipment used to make traditional American cheeses, Chen says. And, importantly, the government recognizes the cheese made by the new method as the real McCoy, potentially guaranteeing America an ample supply of the cheese essential for pizza and other favorite foods.

Speeding up Web images
With a little help from a pair of astronomers, the aggravation of waiting — and waiting and waiting — for high-resolution images to download to a computer could fade into the past.

A newly patented software code developed by Jeffrey Percival, a UW–Madison astronomer, and Richard White, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, promises to speed up the delivery of images over the Internet 10 to 100 times. “The niche that this technology fits,” says Percival, “is if your images are large compared to your bandwidth.”

The technology, he says, could be especially useful for the growing number of Internet users, such as scientists, publishers, engineers, libraries and agencies that require high-density image delivery.

The software delivers pictures so that only the most important information is sent first, allowing the computer to rapidly build a quality picture. The image improves over time as the vastly larger amount of less important elements of the picture are transmitted.