New handheld medical scanners coupled with regular cell phones resemble "Star Trek" tricorders and could see what ails you with a push of a button.
The invention, using off-the-shelf cell phone technology, would allow medical scanners to boldly go where none have gone before — to the aid of the roughly three-quarters of the world's population currently without access to ultrasounds, X-rays and other imagers used for everything from detecting tumors to monitoring fetuses.
In addition to offering medical scans in developing nations, the devices "could find their way in ambulances, or rural clinics," said Boris Rubinsky, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
Medical imagers are typically bulky combinations of scanners, processors and video monitors. Rubinsky and his colleagues instead physically separated these components, so the most complicated elements of imagers — the powerful computer processors — can reside at a remote central location.
The researchers next devised a simple portable scanner that could plug into a cell phone. The phones transmit the raw scanning data to the processors, which create images to relay back for viewing on the cell phone screen.
We're getting closer to the world of Star Trek. We already have our clamshell portable communication devices (i.e. cell phones), phasers, and we're still working on the impulse engines, and even the transporter beam. And now we're getting to the point of having portable medical tricorders into our doctors hands for scanning, analysis, and treatment of patients. Of course, there is one doctor I know who really doesn't need a tricorder to scan and analyze his patients. From YouTube:
He's dead Jim!
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