Dr. Xu's team showed that the virtual patient, using more sophisticated modeling such as how fat is distributed in the body, can provide more accurate calculations of how much additional radiation an overweight person requires.

WSJ: Scientists Find Safer Ways to Test Medical Procedures

First introduced by Alan Guth of MIT in 1980 to explain (among other points) why the geometry of the universe appears to be flat and why matter is distributed so evenly throughout space, the theory also offered solid grounds for modeling how galaxies formed as the universe evolved.

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