20 Potential Technological Advances in the Future of Medicine: Part I.

As there are so many amazing things going on worldwide in medicine and healthcare, I thought creating a shortlist of some of the most promising ideas and developments would give us a glimpse into the future of medicine. The job of a medical futurist is to give a good summary of the ongoing projects and detect the ones with the biggest potential to be used in everyday medical practices. 1) New disease categories due to the excessive use of virtual reality solutions in gaming and other industries will appear. Examples include virtual post-traumatic stress disorder (v-PTSD) which might be the diagnosis for gamers who participate in large virtual battles wearing VR masks (such as Call of Duty of Battlefield) and experience similar symptoms as those soldiers who fought in real wars. Expect to see ICD codes assigned to such new conditions. 2) Real-time diagnostics should be in the focus for the next few years. The intelligent surgical knife (iKnife) was developed by Zoltan Takats of Imperial College London and works by using an old technology where an electrical current heats tissue to make incisions with minimal blood loss, but with iKnife the vaporized smoke is analyzed by a mass spectrometer to detect the chemicals in the biological sample. It means it can identify whether the tissue is malignant real-time. Surgeons will love this surgical Jedi knife which can significantly reduce the length of operations. 3) While better and better data input solutions arise, we will pro...
Source: ScienceRoll - Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Authors: Tags: Biotechnology eHealth Health 2.0 Innovation List Medicine Medicine 2.0 Radiology Video Web 2.0 bionic cyborg future google glass Healthcare ptsd social media Surgery Source Type: blogs