Imaging how and where we breathe oxygen: another Big Short?

The Big Short (1) tells the story of a small group of skeptics who profited from the financial crisis in 2007 by betting against collateralized (mortgage) debt obligations (CDO). Importantly, the novel paints a clear picture of the eccentric nature of contrarians who think divergently and against the grain or bet against an accepted truth or “sure” thing. In a similar manner, Ishii and co-workers’ recent work (2) describes their team’s development of a pulmonary imaging technology that provides divergent and disruptive in vivo lung measurements of oxygen partial pressure in the context of the prevailing and longstanding consensus around FEV1 as the definitive diagnostic of chronic lung disease.