 Earth from over 200 miles above is an inspiring sight, but this unique vantage point has practical value as well. Since the early 1970s, a series of satellites looking at our planet has been producing highly valuable pictures. These images, colorized and enhanced with computers, are used to monitor erosion, urban growth, and environmental changes, and to identify certain types of crops and timber resources. It's called multi-spectral scanning, and thanks to research scientists like Doug Rickman at NASA's National Space Technology Laboratory in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, satellite data processing techniques are now being applied to medical images like this one. The goal? Improved disease detection and treatment capabilities. One of the keys to this effort is a relatively new body scanning technique called magnetic resonance. This particular MR unit is part of Washington University's Malinpropt Institute of Radiology in St. Louis, Missouri. The patient is carefully positioned by a skilled technologist, then slid into a super strong magnet. No harmful radiation is involved. The MR generates images that look to the untrained eye like X-rays, but there's a very important difference. X-rays are most sensitive to bone. MRs to other tissues in the body, like the brain. What brings NASA into the picture is the fact that the MR produces these images in digital form, meaning they can be processed by a computer just like the picture information transmitted via satellite. Research scientists at NSTL use their unique software package to assemble different black-and-white views produced by the scanner into a single composite image. Next color is added because we see things much better in color than in black-and-white. Color images like this can then be blown up and enhanced to bring out particular areas of concern to the physician. Much important information present in the standard black-and-white format is not clearly visible until these processing techniques are applied according to associate professor of radiology at Washington University, Dr. Michael Vanier. What happened with the use of the NSTL satellite image processing technology is that now we're studying the examinations in a much more detailed way. We can often contribute very significantly to the management of patients. By answering questions we simply couldn't answer any other way. The people at Washington University are now setting up their own image analysis system. The hope is that in the near future this technology will become a standard tool in patient evaluations. We think that for certain selected examinations that the actual surgical procedure that's done on the patient or whether the decision whether or not to do surgery will be based on the results of this type of multispectral analysis. And that's a remarkable finding in technology which has only been applied for the last year or so. NASA's medical imaging effort helping doctors make the most of an exciting new diagnostic tool.