giving wired bras a whole new meaning

remember that cancer-fighting bra i hipped y’all to back in october? well, it seems another “special” bra is currently in development at the institute for materials research and innovation at the university of bolton in the uk, this one a bit more user-friendly.

to the naked eye, it will look like any other ordinary bra, but there is nothing ordinary about what this lil gal will be able to do. a web of small antennae built into the cups, these babies will pick up any electromagnetic radiation given off by your body heat, alerting you to any slight change that may occur, a warning sign to breast cancer cells.

at this point, i think a little biology lesson is due. see, the cells in your body are constantly dividing. and while normal, healthy cells divide at a normal, healthy rate, cancer cells divide uncontrollably. cells depend on your blood to stay alive and functioning, and since your body can’t differentiate between the healthy ones and the poisonous ones, it automatically pumps all the blood these little suckers need so that they can survive and continue on their divide-and-conquer course.

this increased blood flow causes your body to warm–albeit minutely–but it’s this slight raise in body temperature that the new bra has been designed to measure as a warning to get your ladies checked out. and for those already battling the beast, it can aide in revealing the effectiveness of your chemotherapy. if the tumor is still growing, “it gives off heat, then we pick it up with the equipment, which means the chemotherapy is not working,” says institute director elias siores. visualizations from the thermographic technology could also help doctors perform better biopsies by increasing the location’s accuracy.

the technology still has a few kinks to work out; the new bra produced false negatives, missing the cancerous cells in 25 percent of the tests. that 25 percent might sound like an awfully high number, but sheryl gabram, deputy director of the georgia cancer center for excellence at grady, points out that mammograms miss their mark 10 to 20 percent of the time. “just because you get a mammogram doesn’t mean you are free and clear,” she says, emphasizing that mammography is still the most effective current technology for diagnosing breast cancer.

which, it should be noted, the bra’s developers agree on: the thermography bra should be used as a supplement to mammograms, not as a replacement. but gabram believes the bra could be especially helpful to three categories of at-risk women: those in developing countries that lack or have limited access to mammograms, women who have a family history of the disease, and women who have had the disease and need to be screened for recurrences.

the technology behind the bra is still in the process of perfecting. to make this a viable, researchers are trying to make the bra as accurate as possible while still keeping it compact enough to wear. by inserting a removable metallic mesh net into the cup, interference coming from a computer or cell phone is blocked, ensuring that scientists collect only the data that they want.

while earlier types of imaging used infrared waves to measure only heat on the surface, siores’ bra uses microwave frequencies that gather heat profiles from inside the body. because the frequencies of microwaves allow scientists to target a certain depth in the body, the antenna technology can analyze more than just breasts; there are also plans to start collecting microwave data as women go through pregnancy.

“you never know,” says siores. “we may find information regarding the well-being of babies.”

biology bras breast cancer breasts elias siores georgia cancer center sheryl gabram university of bolton Posted under boob news, bras, breast cancer, Featured by admin