Newly developed technology is being at launched at hospitals to prevent and detect medical issues sooner, helping patients avoid costly medical visits or trips to the emergency room, according to The New York Times.
"Technology every day is playing a more important role in preventing and even diagnosing illness," said Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association. "We are just beginning this journey of revolutionizing healthcare and reducing trips to the doctor."
Jeff Brue, a tech guru for Hollywood films, brought his OpenDrives digital storage system to the healthcare industry. The system lets hospitals store high resolution MRI scans, PET scans and other 3-D images on its network without having to compress them. Most hospital networks compress stored images, which can make the images fuzzy and possibly result in physicians missing information.
A PET scan can typically take four minutes to retrieve from a network, but takes five seconds through this system, Mr. Brue said. This makes it easier for providers to pull multiple high-resolution images from the network and share them with oncologists and radiologists in different offices, he added. Mr. Brue said he's also adding artificial intelligence tools to help with diagnosis.
The Steadman Clinic, an orthopedic surgical hospital in Vail, Colo., became the first health facility to bring in the OpenDrives system. Mr. Brue is also talking to several other hospitals about implementing the system.
Additionally, more researchers are using AI to help radiologists make more accurate diagnostic decisions, particularly with breast cancer.
Regina Barzilay, PhD, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Constance Lehman, MD, PhD, chief of breast imaging at the department of radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, created an AI system to improve the detection and diagnosis of lesions on mammograms.
The system uses machine learning to find similarities between a patient's breast and a database of 70,000 images for which a malignant or benign outcome was known.
Dr. Barzilay expects the early detection technology, which is employed at Massachusetts General, to be tested in 10 to 15 more hospitals by the end of the year.