Technology, Medicine and Questioning the Convention

Nov 29
08:38

2012

Sharad Gaikwad

Sharad Gaikwad

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Despite the fact that we are in an extremely tech-savvy era, we are still getting used to telemedicine. Speaking of which, you wouldn’t be surprised if there are people who don’t have a clue as to what it is – and happen to have a blood glucose monitoring pen right up their sleeve.

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We need to understand the alignment of technology to the field of medicine as that is going to be the way forward.

Artificial Intelligence

IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri are a few of the many examples wherein medical applications are slowly emerging in the tech arena. The ultimate aim is to assist physicians and doctors with diagnostic procedures and thereby a complete medical support. ‘Cloud’ would come to serve as a powerful medium through which anyone could access these medical AI tools and services. As an example,Technology, Medicine and Questioning the Convention Articles a CAT scan report can be shipped to the Cloud to be accessed by a physician with a medical AI tool and help him understand the significance of the scan. One of the good things is that PAP smears and a few mammograms have already been augmented with some form of AI which helps physicians in pattern recognition and others alike.

The best use of these kinds of AI-laden medical tools is in dermatology where a physician can recognize kind of rashes or any other skin condition and understands the severity of the condition eventually slowing down the doctor’s referral pattern (which is not a very good thing). Don’t be surprised if doctors start sending reports, pictures and other relevant medical data over the Cloud. One of the biggest advantages is that there are customer friendly apps such as Skin Scan, where one has the choice of taking a picture of his skin condition and feeding it to the app which tells him/her if the condition is dangerous or not. He can then choose to consult a dermatologist depending on the outcome. Moreover, the app also provides a list of hospitals nearby through which a user can contact the most appropriate physician.

3D Printing

3D Printing – You might be aware of this Technology but hold your breath it is now being applied to Medical Sciences and is prophesized to have a full blown effect shortly. 3-D Printing technology finds applications in certain areas of medicine such as stem cell therapy. For instance, if one is missing a leg from an accident, then physicians can use 3-D Printing technology to scan the remaining leg and perhaps, develop a prosthetic leg which has no tissue compatibility issues. It’s like fooling the human immunological system and we personally can’t wait for it to show itself up in the market. As you might have realized, 3D printing is a beautiful and tech-friendly version of our good old medical pal namely stem cell therapy. You might be seeing a lot more of 3-D printing in the future and the hope is that very soon; there would be library of tissue-compatible organs.

We’ll look at a few more prospective IT-related Medical strategies in the next article and touch upon the usability aspect in more depth.