Galileo Galilei was the first person to point a telescope at the night sky. Having gazed heretically upon very large and distant celestial bodies, he realised he could use the same technology to magnify smaller terrestrial ones closer to home. Lenses with a shorter focal length enabled Galileo to squint at insects as well as planets. He called the new device his occhiolino, or little eye. We call it the microscope.

Today scientists apply technology across similarly vast differences of scale. By observing how the light of distant stars passes through interstellar gas and dust, astronomers have been able to interpret what exists in the outer reaches of space. Now, researchers from Exeter University in Britain are using the same technique to detect breast cancer.

The team, which comprises medical physicists and astronomers, is using the same code that has been applied to starlight to model how the light of a laser penetrates breast tissue. They are searching for small shifts in the wavelength of light that may signify the tell-tale presence of calcium deposits created by breast cancer. This method of cancer detection has the potential to be more accurate than a standard mammogram, and could eventually be used to find different types of cancer as well as other diseases.

Astronomers are looking at the way light moves from a distant star and goes through interstellar gas and hits our eye, says Charlie Jeynes, who is part of the team at Exeter. Were using that exact same process to look at the way light comes out of a laser, goes through breast tissue and hits a detector.

Other scientists are looking to the stars for inspiration to fight heart disease. A team from the University of Hertfordshire in Britain has been investigating how machine-learning techniques developed in astronomy could be turned towards medical imaging.

In distant galaxies, one of the things we look at is the very centre; an environment called the circumnuclear region, explains Jim Geach, a professor of astrophysics at Hertfordshire. By identifying patterns in the way light is emitted and absorbed in this region, astronomers can learn about a galaxys composition. Working with Richard Underwood, a professor of cardiac imaging at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London, Geach found that a remarkably similar approach could also help to identify patterns of dying or diseased tissue in the human heart: We got talking and realised the data he was looking at, these 3d scans of the heart, closely resembled some of the data we look at in astrophysics.

Galileo would surely have approved. To solve the hardest problems, sometimes all thats required is a change of perspective.

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How stargazing could save your life | 1843 - The Economist 1843