Feb 12, 2026
Dr. Daniel Sodickson is Chief Medical Scientist at Function Health and author of the new book, The Future of Seeing: How Imaging Is Changing Our World. Building on the drive to improve medical imaging, AI and neural networks are now reshaping image interpretation and how and what data are collected. This approach produces high-quality results with minimal additional data and is inspiring innovative scanning techniques and equipment design. The future of medical imaging is the everywhere scanner, enhancing a single-shot session with a large hospital machine with continuous health monitoring through wearables and devices integrated into everyday life.
Daniel explains, "One of the things that imaging can do is peel away all of the obscuring layers of skin or skull or whatever else there is, without having to make a single cut, and show us the inner workings, show us inner space, what's inside. I think that means being able to detect tumors early enough that they can be cured, to guide surgeries, to try to understand what normal anatomy is, and exactly when it turns abnormal. So I think the ability to see what was once invisible has become so much a part of medicine that it's almost hard to imagine it without it."
"There are many analogies between inner space and outer space, and between the tools we have built as humans over the millennia to inspect them. I guess what I'd say, though, is that somehow the inspection of inner space, that sort of medical imaging for understanding our health, is a little bit more intimate. It causes us to ask very personal questions like, " Am I okay? Are my kids okay? Am I normal? What is normal? I think when we look at other types of imaging, imaging the world around us, imaging the cosmos a great distance from us, there are also existential questions, but it's really more, where do I fit in the big picture? So I think in some ways medical imaging picks up where, say, astronomical imaging leaves off and leaves us wondering who we are and how we're built."
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The Future of Seeing: How Imaging Is Changing Our World
