Toward Integral Field Tomography of Living Systems

Abstract

Modern medical diagnostics relies on modality-specific approximations—CT for density, MRI for proton environments, ultrasound for mechanical impedance, and PET for metabolic proxies—each observing a projection of the organism rather than the organism itself. Disease, however, is not merely a structural anomaly but a loss of system stability, often established long before macroscopic changes become detectable. This article introduces the concept of Integral Field Tomography (IFT), a novel framework for reconstructing the internal physiological state of a living organism by solving the inverse problem of its externally measurable physical fields. Living systems are conceptualized as unified, multi-field entities: electrodynamic, magnetodynamic, mechanical continua, metabolic dissipative structures, and information-processing systems far from equilibrium. These processes continuously generate electrical, magnetic, mechanical, and photonic fields that propagate beyond tissue boundaries, serving as fundamental expressions of physiological state. IFT proposes to capture these fields simultaneously using ultra-sensitive detectors—including optically pumped magnetometers, laser vibrometers, and quantum-limited photonic sensors—and to reconstruct the organism's internal state through multi-scale, multi-physics inverse modeling. Artificial intelligence plays an intrinsic role in learning personalized priors, enforcing physical constraints, integrating heterogeneous data, and maintaining a living digital twin of the organism. The framework aligns naturally with active inference, reconceptualizing diagnosis as the estimation of how well the organism minimizes its own variational free energy. This shift from episodic structural imaging to continuous state inference enables detection before structural damage, monitoring of aging as loss of system coherence, evaluation of interventions at the level of state recovery, and the establishment of individualized baselines instead of population norms. Fundamental physical limits—quantum noise, thermal fluctuations, and information-theoretic constraints—lie far above current clinical thresholds, confirming that the primary obstacles are conceptual and computational, not physical. Integral Field Tomography represents not merely a new device but a new epistemology of medicine, transforming diagnostics from looking at bodies to reading living systems as coherent, measurable, dynamic wholes.