Technology
| By : Gurpreet Kaur | Previous | Next |
| Posted on : 02 Sep, 2005 | Total Views : 299 |
ELECTRONICS 2
Computers in Medicine
Computers have already been installed in many hospitals to handle the staggering jobs of billing, filing, and recording. But more sophisticated uses for the computers are already in experimental operation. For small communities devoid of a trained cardiologist, it is common practice for the local physician to mail a patient's electrocardiogram to a specialist and wait several days for a detailed reply. The waiting time can be reduced to minutes by having the patient's electrocardiogram translated into computer language, fed via telephone data link to a centrally located medical unit, analyzed by a computer, checked by a cardiologist in attendance, and returned via the telephone data link. An International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation 1401 data processing system used with more than 300 patients at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York has had an accuracy that compares favorably with that of the best electrocardiographers in the field.
Computers can analyze the numerous facts relevant to a particular allergy and prescribe the proper treatment within seconds; an experienced allergist requires at least an hour. A computer program developed at the Mayo Clinic can deliver results of a printed personality evaluation test in less than a minute; a staff psychiatrist or psychologist formerly spent close to an hour to compile each test result. A computer-controlled system in one hospital provides the results of 1,000 blood tests an hour compared to 60 delivered by a highly skilled lab technician.
Perhaps the most promising of all efforts linking the computer with medicine is in the area of diagnosis. Physicians cannot possibly find the time to keep up with the voluminous amount of medical literature, research advances, and new drugs. A national—and perhaps even worldwide—computer center is under consideration to house data, statistics, and literature abstracts. Under such an arrangement, a physician, clinic worker, or medical research scientist could contact the center by telephone or data link and supply a list of symptoms. He could then request specific information to identify a particular disease and even be supplied with latest medical literature and drug data to cope with the problem.
