Definition
The human body consists of nanometer-sized units including proteins, apatite crystallites, collagen, and myelin fibers. Imaging, here, means the identification, localization, and quantification of these units within the human body.
Overview
The human body consists of about 1027 molecules. This number is so huge that it is impossible to determine their location or even only to store this amount of data. Using a logarithmic scale (see Fig. 1), one realizes that a biological cell with an extension of about 10 μm includes as many molecules like the human body biological cells. Even the number of cells within the human body is huge and beyond our imagination. The number of stars in the Milky Way, for example, is thousand times smaller than this number. Therefore, for imaging the human body on the nanometer scale, one has to restrict to predefined parts of the body or to take advantage of symmetries or periodicities as known...
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Deyhle, H., Schulz, G., Müller, B. (2016). Imaging the Human Body Down to the Molecular Level. In: Bhushan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Nanotechnology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6178-0_326-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6178-0_326-2
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