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You could consider that the inspiration for advanced medical equipment has come right from “Star Trek.” In that popular science fiction series of television shows and movies, all it took is a quick scan from a “tricorder” for the ship’s doctors to know exactly what was wrong with a patient. Then it was a zap of a “hypo-spray” needle or some micro laser surgery and the crew members were ready to boldly go where they needed to go. Today, many of those sci-fi innovations are becoming a reality.
It’s hard to go a week without hearing about some new technological advancement breaking in healthcare news. Recently at the German Metrology Institute, the world’s most powerful magnetic resonance imaging system was brought on line. This new MRI machine is providing the sharpest images yet of a person’s internal organs. For the first test run of this new piece of medical equipment, images of a person’s heart were captured in amazing detail. Doctors were able to clearly see a beating heart and distinguish between blood vessels and muscle tissue. This cutting-edge device generates power that is 150,000 times the magnetic field of Earth and is going to greatly improve cardiac diagnosis, especially in emergency situations.
At the Nanorobotics Laboratory at Polytechnique Montreal, the medical researchers are finding a more effective way of delivering medicine to attack cancer cells through the use of nanomedicine. Essentially, these are extremely tiny micro machines the size of cells that can be programmed to target specific cells without harming the surrounding healthy tissues. Remember the movie “Fantastic Voyage?” It’s like that, but without the tiny people!







