Question: what is one of the ways that we can get better pictures of peoples lungs?

Duncan McNicholl answered on 13 Nov 2017:

By getting inside them. At the moment, almost all of the pictures we take of peoples’ lungs are taken from the outside, because the branching structure that you have inside a lung gets too narrow to push a camera into. The problem is that X-ray pictures are pretty rubbish, and it can be really difficult to see what’s going on, especially if what’s going on is that there are bacteria in there. remember bacteria are really tiny, and seeing them on a big picture is hard, never mind telling which sort they are. My work involves taking a camera that uses a fibre optic, and pushing that fibre optic all the way into peoples’ lungs to take pictures from the inside. The trouble is, the fibre optic has be only about a millimetre wide so that it can fit, and that’s a pretty small piece of glass to be looking through.