star trek health scanner

Building the Tricorder: The race to create a real-life Star Trek medical scanner

Its vision of romantic encounters with aliens and plagues of tribbles may not have come to pass just yet, but Star Trek has proved surprisingly accurate in predicting the future in other ways.

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When it comes to technology, the show's gadgets have already become reality in several cases: its communicator predicted the clamshell mobile phone, the food replicator was made real with 3D food printing , and Captain Kirk was using voice input long before Alexa became a household name.

But of all Star Trek's technological imaginings, it's the Tricorder that continues to capture the popular and scientfic imagination: a handheld medical device that could be used to analyse a patient, helping doctors diagnose and treat the crew on the bridge and beyond.

No blood tests, no X-rays, no genetic sequencing: Star Trek's doctors could just point their tricorders at the patient and seconds later work out if they'd succumbed to a cold or the Quazulu VIII virus.

The Tricorder continues to fascinate because it magically solves some of the problems about medicine we still have today: it takes too long, it's expensive, it's uncertain, and the times you need it most -- when you're far from home -- is often when it's unavailable.

People have been trying to make replicate elements of the Tricorder since the 1990s. But it's only in the last few years that the dream of creating a genuine Tricorder-type device has seemed within reach.

The first signs that a medical Tricorder could be more than a sci-fi fantasy coincided with the emergence of the first serious smartphones and tablets. Back in 2007, MIT researchers used a Nokia 770 as the basis for a Tricorder , displaying information from sensor networks, while a few years later, a rash of medical peripherals released for the iPhone offered the hope that Apple's mobile could be turned into a real-life Tricorder .

Such early discussions focused on customising existing mobile hardware to a medical diagnostic device; the first standalone device would be a few years further on.

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One of the first companies to make a serious attempt at creating a Tricorder was Scanadu, which released a device called the Scout in 2015 .The Scout could measure a handful of vital signs -- blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, and temperature -- by being held up to a patient's forehead. It's not quite the Tricorder's no-touch technique, and had no diagnostic capabilities, but it was arguably further towards such a device than any hardware before it. After raising $1.7m on Indiegogo, and several million dollars more from investors , the Scout eventually went on sale. However, the company had released it under the banner of a " research device for investigational use ". When it subsequently failed to win FDA approval -- for unspecified reasons -- the research effectively came to an end, and devices were bricked, leaving buyers furious .

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Despite the Scout's difficulties, there was no shortage of companies that were looking to succeed were Scanadu had failed.

As befits a potentially game-changing and technologically-complex device, the Tricorder concept had caught Google's eye. Back in 2014, the head of life sciences at what was then Google X, the company's moonshot division, announced a cancer-detection system that would lay the foundations for the creation of a Tricorder. The system that Dr Andrew Conrad announced aimed to use magnetic nanoparticles that would attach themselves to cancer particles; a separate wrist-worn device would measure the particles to detect cancer. The system would over time form part of a real-life Tricorder, Conrad said.

"Instead [of] going to the doctor who says, 'Let me draw blood and in three days I'll call you if there's anything wrong,' the doctor can look and say, 'Oh, I just checked all your blood over this last year, and it looks like your kidneys are good, your liver is good, I don't see any indication of oncologic cells, pretty good, thanks.' ... We want to have a Tricorder where Dr. McCoy will wave this thing and say, 'Oh, you're suffering from Valerian death fever.' And he'd then give some shot in a person's neck and they'd immediately get better. We won't do the shots -- our partners will do the shots. But we're hoping to build the Tricorder," he told Medium at the time.

Since then, Google and its X division have been reorganised: Google's life sciences arm has become Verily, now overseen -- along with Google and other Google spinouts, including Calico -- by a new parent company Alphabet . Conrad remains head of Verily, but his dream of a Star Trek-grade medical device has not come to pass: Verily has yet to showcase any progress on building either the cancer-detection system or the Tricorder itself.

A spokesperson for Verily says its nanoparticles research is still active, but added it had experienced difficulties in the past: "Our nanoparticle research is focused on developing nanoparticles that demonstrate consistent properties. We found that nanoparticles we purchased from third-party manufacturers have been unreliable in research due to inconsistencies."

The $10m prize

Arguably one of the biggest stimulants for building a Tricorder came when chipmaker Qualcomm sponsored the Tricorder XPRIZE , a competition intended to help foster the creation of innovative medical hardware.

Rather than asking for a machine that can read vitals to help diagnose any number of illnesses, the XPRIZE asked for hardware that could diagnose a set list of 13 medical condition, including anaemia and diabetes, as well as monitor a handful of vital signs.

The prize, launched in 2011, was won last year by Basil Leaf Technologies with a device called DxtER , a small unit with a range of specific medical peripherals, including a sensor for heart and lung sounds, an ECG monitor for measuring heart rate and rhythm, and a device for analysing blood glucose and white cell count, a sign of infection and inflammation when raised.

By winning the prize, the inventors -- a group of siblings and others led by Philadelphia-based emergency room physician Basil Harris -- received a $2.6m grant to help take the DxtER from concept to commercialisation.

However, the first publicly available device based on this technology is likely to have a far smaller scope than Bones' Tricorder. Basil Leaf Technologies is working on creating a monitoring device for a single disease state, congestive cardiac failure (CCF), that a patient could keep with them at home to help monitor the progress of their condition. The aim is for a person with CCF, a chronic condition, to interact with the device a couple of times a day, and that information to be sent back to a medical professional to review. With such longitudinal monitoring, a doctor can monitor the patient's progress regularly without having to ask them to take time out of their days to come in for regular check-ups.

"A diagnostic device that can diagnose one of 13 medical conditions is not really that viable -- a first year medical resident can diagnose 75 to 100 medical conditions. We just designed something to win a prize, but it's not something that's useful out in the marketplace yet. And if you think about how the FDA in the United States approves medical devices, if we sought an approval for a medical device that did a large collection of medical conditions, it would take aeons to be approved. From a strategic point of view, we changed our strategy and said let's focus on one disease state," Phil Charron, head of user experience at Basil Leaf Technologies, tells ZDNet.

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Nonetheless, Basil Leaf Technologies is still working towards creating a Tricorder in the way that most people think of it: a single device that can diagnose a range of conditions. For a real-life Tricorder to serve as a universal diagnostic tool in the way that Star Trek envisioned, it would need to be able to analyse far more biomarkers than the DxtER currently does.

Handily, scientists are also working on expanding the capabilities of Tricorder-like devices. Earlier this year, researchers from the University of Glasgow created a handheld sensor device based on a CMOS chip that can analyse a number of metabolites in blood or urine, analysing them to diagnose conditions including heart attacks.

Elsewhere, companies are working on creating Tricorder type hardware with a focus on infectious disease: the Q-POC, made by QuantumDx, is expected to launch next year, and brings handheld diagnostics for bacterial and viral infections. The idea of the Q-POC is putting short-read genetic sequencing into a device the size of a smartphone: with a sample of bodily fluid, the reader could pick up not only the nature of an infection, like TB, but also its resistance to particular drugs. The technology already exists and is in common use, but shrinking it down to a device that can fit in a pocket is QuantumDx's real challenge.

The fact that the company has had to put back the Q-POC's launch date from 2016 to 2019 shows that miniaturisation is no small task. In fact, it's one of the key challenges that exists for building a Tricorder: the technology that doctors use to diagnose illnesses already exists, but it often exists in large, discrete machines, often spread around different parts of a hospital. Tricorders have to bring all of those capabilities into a single device that can be carried by one person.

"Most of the technologies that exist out there we can turn into something we can put into the patient's hands, I think that [the challenge] is more about shrinking the technologies that exist. A lot of the things that a physician can do in a regular exam room we put in a Tricorder. Labs and radiology -- that's the difficult thing to shrink down into a Tricorder," Basil Leaf Technologies' Charron says.

As well as difficulties with hardware, creating the right software for Tricorders is likely a number of years away. Creating algorithms that can diagnose certain conditions from a tight set of physical biomarkers is one thing, but there's an old adage in medicine that 'if you listen hard enough, the patient will tell you the diagnosis'. To be a universal diagnostic device, Tricorders will not only have to interpret test results, they'll also need software that knows the right questions to ask and unpick the answers they get back: a patient saying they have a tight chest pain and a sharp chest pain might sound similar, but could be the difference between a full blown heart attack or pericarditis -- a painful, but relatively benign, infection of the heart's covering.

"Our expectations about the medical tricorder stem from Star Trek and it's never a good decision to base expectations on science fiction, even though many technologies have become real from science fiction in the 21st century," says Dr Bertalan Meskó, director of The Medical Futurist Institute . And it doesn't mean we won't need doctors, Meskó says.

"There is a reason why we train medical professionals for decades and artificial intelligence-based algorithms, tricorders and many other advanced technologies are designed to upgrade their capabilities so they can use their unique vision, expertise and experience while focusing on the patients. The tricorder should make this possible instead of replacing what physicians do today."

Though the challenges to a medical Tricorder remain substantial, technology companies show no signs of waning enthusiasm for the device. That's because the potential applications for such hardware are huge. Many of the companies working on the tech today envision their machines being used by healthcare staff that aren't doctors to go do some of the run-of-the-mill diagnostic legwork, calling in doctors only for the trickiest of cases.

And, aside from managing consultants' workloads better, Tricorders could potentially make a much more significant contribution to medicine. Imagine an area -- be it in rural Europe or rural Africa -- where population density is lower, and the provision of medical care is even more sparse. Instead of having to drive for hours or even days to find a doctor the next time you take sick, a Tricorder in the home or local clinic could help you to decide whether you need to get to the nearest A&E or take a couple of aspirin and sleep off the fever.

"A working tricorder could bring about a new era in medicine," says Meskó.

Instead of expensive machines and long waiting times, information would be available immediately. Physicians could scan a patient, or patients could scan themselves and receive a list of diagnostic options and suggestions. "Imagine the influence it could have on underdeveloped regions. It should not substitute for medical supervision, but when there is none it comes in handy. Also, it would make the biggest promise of digital health real: making patients the point-of-care. Technologically, it's absolutely viable," says Meskó.

Perhaps the most interesting use of the Tricorder takes us right back to the device's sci-fi conception. Should humans ever attempt more long-distance space travel, a Tricorder would be a must: a manned mission to Mars could see astronauts travel for weeks or months without access to the full repertoire of medical support.

A sufficiently advanced Tricorder could help astronauts keep in good health during the journey. Without it, it's hard to imagine how the next generation of astronauts will be able to boldly go where no one has gone before.

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How close are we to a real Star Trek-style medical tricorder?

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Does science inspire fiction or does it work the other way around? In the case of medical technology, the long-running TV and film series Star Trek has increasingly been inspiring researchers worldwide. Two teams were recently awarded the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize for developing handheld devices that can diagnose a range of diseases and check a patient’s vital signs without invasive tests – inspired by Star Trek’s medical “tricorder” device.

In the show, a doctor would use the tricorder and its detachable scanner to quickly gather data on a patient and instantly work out what was wrong with them. It could check organ functions and detect diseases and their causes, and also contained data on a range of alien lifeforms. But how close are we really to using such devices (assuming we don’t need them to diagnose aliens)?

The main aim of the two prizewinners is to integrate several technologies in one device. They haven’t created an all-in-one handheld machine but they do both represent significant steps forward.

The main winner, known as DxtER and created by US firm Basil Leaf Technologies, is actually an iPad app with artificial intelligence. It uses a number of non-invasive sensors that can be attached to the body to collect data about vital signs, body chemistry and biological functions. The runner-up technology from Taiwan’s Dynamical Biomarkers Group similarly connects a smartphone to several wireless handheld test modules that can analyse vital signs, blood and urine, and skin appearance.

The judges said both devices nearly met the benchmarks for accurately diagnosing 13 diseases including anaemia, lung disease, diabetes, pneumonia and urinary tract infection. These are the most successful efforts we’ve seen to bring so many functionalities into a single, user-friendly, portable diagnostic system.

Part of the success is due to the development of a variety of technologies that make up such all-in-one systems, although they still have some way to go. Probably the most advanced are mobile vital signs monitoring devices. For example, the ViSi Mobile System can remotely monitor all core vital signs including blood pressure, blood oxygen, heart rate and electrical activity, and skin temperature. It uses electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors attached to the chest and a pressure sensor in cuffs on the thumb and arm, both attached to a wearable wrist unit that feeds all the signals wirelessly to desktop or mobile device, with the same accuracy as conventional intensive care equipment .

All the various sensor data from a system such as this then needs to be turned into meaningful readings – and that requires specialist software. For example, the Airstrip Technologies software can pull in information from hundreds of different types and brands of patient monitors and other equipment, as well as medical records, scan results and even messaging apps, to display a full picture of patient’s changing condition in real time.

Portable imaging technologies are another element needed to assess a patient and present the relevant information. For example, there are already miniaturized USB-based ultrasound probes that can connect directly to a smartphone to provide instant ultrasound images. With the quality of mobile cameras and image processing capabilities continually improving, this technology is likely to get even better in the near future. This could mean instant X-ray scans or skin abnormality diagnosis using pattern recognition software.

Data and diagnosis

But vital signs information and images aren’t enough for a fully automated device that can tell you what’s actually wrong with a patient. The most mature technology we have in this area is for diabetes monitoring. Portable home blood glucose meters that can test a drop of blood on a paper can already be connected to mobile apps to allow diabetes sufferers to assess the severity of their condition.

Meanwhile, completely non-invasive methods for measuring glucose that don’t involve finger pricking to get a drop of blood are under development. These include analysing sweat or the interstitial fluid located a few micrometres below the skin’s surface (above the pain-causing nerves).

A number of innovative companies around the world are focusing on using similar handheld systems to diagnose other diseases, including HIV, tuberculosis, bacterial infections and cardiovascular disease. These rely on the key enabling technology of microfluidics, which uses specially designed microchips to manipulate tiny amounts of liquid.

Commonly known as lab-on-a-chip technology , this allows you to reduce a complete clinical laboratory testing system to a device a few centimetres across. You can take a sample, prepare it for testing (for example by isolating bacteria in the blood) and identify and measure the microbe present.

But while there has been significant progress in the developing bits and pieces of a tricorder, there is still work to do putting them altogether in a genuinely handheld package. Various equipment needs to be miniaturised and we need more progress in portable computers so they can handle all the information and data required for a complete picture of a patient’s health condition. We also need more development of the more thorough diagnostic features, such as the lab-on-chip and portable imaging systems, and less invasive testing methods. We may not have a tricorder in our hands yet, but we are definitely getting closer.

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The Star Trek ‘tricorder’ is real and it instantly spots wounds

The swift ray 1 revolutionizes wound assessment and would make doctor mccoy proud..

 PHOTOGRAPH: Swift Medical

Any fan of Star Trek will recognize the famed “tricorder”, a scanning device that allowed Doctor Leonard McCoy, or “Bones”, to instantly diagnose a range of maladies. Fast-forward nearly six decades from the device’s first appearance on screen, and scientists from Canada and Mexico have delivered a modern-day iteration with the Swift Ray 1 – a groundbreaking handheld diagnostic tool that connects to smartphones and that utilizes heat signatures and bacterial fluorescence to pinpoint infected wounds.

The Swift Ray 1, a true marvel of miniaturization, boasts the distinction of being the world’s first compact hyperspectral device, according to the team behind the device. Designed to slip comfortably into your pocket, the Swift Ray 1 can capture heat emitted by an injury site, empowering healthcare providers to distinguish between inflammation and infection.

In a clinical study of 66 wounds, the Swift Ray 1 classified 20 as non-inflamed, 26 as inflamed, and 20 as infected. Employing a machine learning algorithm known as k-nearest neighbor, the device achieved a remarkable identification rate of 100% for infected wounds and 91% for non-infected examples.

Discovering the transition from regular inflammation to a potentially serious infection can be a significant challenge for medical practitioners, as even healing wounds exhibit varying degrees of redness. Robert Fraser, a corresponding author from Western University and Swift Medical Inc., emphasized the pressing need for advanced tools in wound care, stating, “Wound care is one of today’s most expensive and overlooked threats to patients and our overall healthcare system.”

The Swift Ray 1 can be used with a smartphone through a dedicated app, providing medical-grade photographs alongside infrared thermography images that measure heat and bacterial fluorescence imaging, which illuminates bacteria when exposed to ultraviolet light.

Lead author Dr. Jose Ramirez-GarciaLuna from McGill University Health Centre explained, “Thermography provides insight into the inflammatory and circulatory changes happening under the skin.” What sets the Swift Ray 1 apart is its ability to comprehensively incorporate various skin pigments – a crucial advantage over conventional visual diagnostic tools that often rely solely on eyesight triaging.

While researchers acknowledge that further exploration is required, this pioneering multipurpose gadget holds immense promise. Its potential to expedite interventions could be a game-changer, particularly in swiftly managing infections. Fraser cautioned, however, “This was a pilot study, and follow-up studies are planned”. To fully validate its efficacy across diverse populations and wound types, future investigations are on the horizon. The study’s findings have been documented in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, marking a significant stride in the evolution of wound assessment technology.

The coming together of scientific advancement and medical practice often throws up remarkable devices, but we have to admit, this one looks amazing. And let’s face it makes Bones’ old tricorder look a little clunky.

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Star Trek’s “tricorder” medical scanner just got closer to becoming a reality

Throughout the myriad voyages of the crews of the Starship Enterprise, medical officers always carried with them a futuristic little device, about the size of a cellphone, that allowed them to diagnose any ailment—alien or otherwise. Just by waving the device, called a tricorder, over the patient’s body, they could get a complete rundown of all vitals and diseases.

XPrize, the nonprofit that ran the competition to get the first privately funded spaceship off the ground and awarded the $10 million prize back in 2004, was similarly interested in incentivizing the development of a tricorder-like medical device. Five years ago, it joined with chip manufacturer Qualcomm to establish a $10 million prize to do just that. And now it has announced the winners.

A team led by Basil Harris, an ER doctor with an engineering doctorate, and his brother George Harris, a network engineer, took home the grand prize. Their group was awarded $2.6 million, with the aim of helping them turn their working concept into a real product. The runner-up, a team led by Chung-Kang Peng, a doctor and professor at Harvard Medical School, and backed by the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer HTC, was awarded $1 million for its effort.

Both teams used a mobile device and a series of connected sensors to measure a range of vital health indicators with ease. While neither system quite had the scope of the original tricorders, the Harrises’ system achieved what the competition asked for—the goal for the competition was to create a device that could diagnose 13 ailments and measure five vital signs at once.

The Harris brothers’ system is made up of a series of 3D-printed devices that pair over Bluetooth to an iPad Mini. The devices come with a large sheet of information on how to use each item, rather like a one-page Ikea manual for personal healthcare. Basil Harris told Quartz that he was inspired to put his past engineering passions to use, while teaming up with his family and friends to design and build the devices in their spare time.

Both finalist teams told Quartz in December that they would pursue commercializing their devices, whether they won or not—and in a first for the XPrize, the organization will help support both teams to do so. The majority of the remaining prize purse that wasn’t handed out to the two groups (some was handed out for milestone achievements during the last four years) will be used to help continue their development, including the necessary consumer testing and regulatory approval. The Roddenberry Foundation, the charitable organization set up by the son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, has also pledged an additional $1.6 million to help develop the finalists’ designs.

While the devices are not quite as polished as the ones that Scotty or Dr. Crusher used on their spaceships, they do have the potential to save millions of lives on this planet, especially in areas with meager medical care. There will be hurdles to clear in bringing the devices to consumers—in the US, for example, medical regulation moves slowly; it will likely take years of trials and studies before a product like this could be sold in the US. But it’s entirely possible that in the near future, because of this competition, we could soon have technology that boldly goes where only fictional medical devices have gone before.

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A real-life medical tricorder: XPrize wants to make it so

From CNET Magazine: An XPrize competition aims to turn a 50-year-old science fiction concept into a powerful medical device that's accessible to all.

If you've ever watched "Star Trek," you've probably coveted one of the ingenious gadgets carried by those polyester-wearing space travelers. Much of the sci-fi series' futuristic tech is the stuff of dreams. But one device, in particular, has always seemed to have life-changing potential. In the "Star Trek" universe, the medical tricorder is an indispensable tool -- a handheld portable scanning device that diagnoses medical conditions within seconds.

This fictional device could solve age-old dilemmas. A typical visit to the doctor today isn't easy: drive to the doctor's office, wait up to an hour in the lobby before an assistant checks your vitals, wait for the doctor to come in and ask questions, travel to have your blood drawn, then wait up to a week for results. And this scenario assumes a lot, not the least of which is that you live near a doctor, have health insurance, can afford to pay the bills and a job flexible enough to let you off work. To simplify the onerous process, the XPrize Foundation is attempting to turn the decades-old tricorder dream into a modern medical reality.

XPrize doesn't shy away from an audacious challenge. This nonprofit organization holds competitions designed to make significant technological breakthroughs in a variety of fields -- all with an eye toward addressing major global challenges. XPrize competitions have focused on everything from private space travel or building a lunar lander to finding more effective ways to clean up oil spills. The Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize competition, announced in 2012 and in its late stages now, will award $10 million in prizes to teams that make a real-world medical diagnostic device inspired by the "Star Trek" tricorder.

The goal is to make a lightweight, easy-to-use device that can monitor key health indicators as well as diagnose much more serious problems. To meet the challenge, tricorders must be able to track five basic vital signs -- such as blood pressure, heart rate and temperature -- in real time and for at least 72 hours straight. They must accurately diagnose 13 "core" conditions, including diabetes, Hepatitis A, stroke and tuberculosis. In addition to those, teams are required to pick three "elective" conditions for diagnosis, ranging from HIV or melanoma to whooping cough or strep throat. The devices need to be able to send that data to the cloud so patients and doctors can access and talk about the results. And that all has to happen with one device that weighs less than 5 pounds, including all of its necessary chargers and attachments.

That's an ambitious goal. "We have to create a system that is verifiably safe and that works at a very high, clinical level. And it has to have a very futuristic consumer experience," said Robert Kaul, the president and CEO of Cloud DX, a Toronto-based company that is competing in the XPrize challenge. "Every one of those [goals] is a huge challenge, but creating all of those in six to eight months is crazy."

Another competitor put it more simply: "It's like giving people a bicycle and saying the first one to Mars wins," said Walter De Brouwer, CEO of Scanadu, which is both a company in Silicon Valley and a team participating in the challenge.

But a lot of smart people are giving it a shot. When the challenge was announced at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show , more than 300 teams registered. A tough selection process whittled down that group to 10 finalists from around the world remained. Now the group is even smaller. In April, two of those teams (Scanadu in California, and Zensor, based in Ireland) combined efforts to work as one team, making a total of nine teams gunning for the top prize.

The teams are making fast progress. They've developed working prototypes that are currently being tested by actual patients at the UC San Diego Medical Center so doctors and the competing teams can learn how these devices might fare in the real world. Those consumer tests work in two ways. First, patients already have known conditions, which allows judges to test the accuracy of the tricorders' diagnoses. Second, they also can offer real-world feedback on how well the products are designed and how easy or hard they are for regular people to figure out.

Not as seen on TV

In concept, the similarities to the medical tricorders on "Star Trek" are apparent. And associating the competition with the franchise was a highly strategic move by XPrize. Part of the purpose of these competitions is to make great technological advances, but another equally important goal is educating the world about critical problems, said Grant Campany, senior director of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize Challenge. There are 40 million people in the world who call themselves trekkies, according to Campany. So by creating a real-life version of a prominent "Star Trek" device, the foundation knew they'd catch the attention of a huge audience from the beginning.

But the devices that come out of this competition won't necessarily look like the ones that graced the sick bays of the starship Enterprise. For one thing, teams took different approaches to solving this problem. And because they'll be testing for so many factors, devices need a variety of sensors and attachments.

Measuring heart rate, for example, typically requires attaching sensors to the skin. For blood pressure, an arm cuff or wristband is standard; for bloodwork, a finger prick test. These all might require special components beyond a basic handheld unit like those used on "Star Trek." And the requirement that vital signs have to be monitored continuously for three days means patients would have to sleep with the product attached to them.

Cloud DX considered all their options. "We looked at sleeves, wrist cuffs, gloves, combinations of biosensors adhered to the body," said Kaul.

When measuring heart rate, Cloud DX didn't want to use the sticky adhesive that's typically used to attach sensors to a patient's chest because, well, it gets itchy. After testing many approaches -- and yes, sleeping in them -- their team settled on the idea of a collar that goes around the back of a patient's neck, with weighted sensors that hang down over his chest.

To measure temperature and oxygen saturation, they designed a small device -- reminiscent of a hearing aid or a Bluetooth headset for a mobile phone -- that sits in a patient's ear with a sensor pointing down to the ear drum.

"It's not just about deploying great technology, but it has to be consumer friendly, futuristic and comfortable," said Kaul. And that's not an exaggeration. Nearly half of the teams' final scores will be based on how consumers interacted with the device -- in short, could people figure out how to use it? Did they enjoy using it?

One mission, many sequels

The consumer products that eventually hit store shelves are likely to be diverse. The XPrize competition is essentially a hyper-charged, hyper-focused test bed. Teams are pushing to figure out what works and what doesn't in both long-term health monitoring and disease diagnostics in an insanely short period of time. But when they go on to actually sell these things, it's likely that they'll focus on one area with a more specialized device.

So how will devices like these ultimately fit into people's lives? The initial goal of the XPrize competition was to solve the problem of access, creating inexpensive take-home devices that could make huge strides in rural areas with little access to medical facilities. But they'll do other things too. Once the competition is over, some teams might take their products in different directions.

"In 5 to 10 years, it's very realistic to believe that tricorders will exist in many forms and be available in many places," said Campany. "We're starting out diagnosing 15 conditions. But as teams prepare to go to market, they might just focus on one capability."

Teams are already making those plans, and some have consumer products in the works. Cloud DX is now taking preorders for a vital-signs monitor called Vitaliti. And Scanadu has already announced the Scanadu Scout, a small health monitor designed by Yves Béhar, and the Scanaflo, an at-home urine analysis kit.

Where and how people will buy the tricorders is still a question. Teams envision selling their tricorders in just about any channel that exists, according to Campany. You might go into CVS to buy or rent one. A large healthcare provider like Kaiser Permanente might loan them out to patients who need long-term monitoring. When it comes to products that are more focused on fitness, people might buy them at a big sportswear store, Best Buy or Amazon.

Uncertainties in the prognosis

For all that promise, tricorders have a long way to go. Regulatory approval presents one big hurdle. It's one thing to develop a cool gadget in a lab. But it's another to get legal clearance and bring it to market. Genetics testing startup 23andMe once offered at-home ancestry and genetic health analysis kits but was forced by the Food and Drug Administration to halt the health screenings . In order to avoid similar regulatory snafus, XPrize partnered with the FDA from the very beginning.

"We're pushing the envelope pretty hard here," said Campany. "The last thing in the world we want is to see these devices make profound diagnoses but yet the FDA has no idea how to handle it." At the moment, 18 employees at the FDA volunteer their time to be available for teams with questions along the way. This helps the teams understand how they need to build devices in order to get approval, long before they've gone too far down a road that might turn out to be a dead end. "The access is unprecedented," Campany said.

Another question is how these devices fit in with the doctor-patient relationship. What happens, for example, when the tricorder delivers really bad news? Like, "you've got cancer" news? Normally that news would be delivered by a doctor, who can give immediate advice and information about how they'll tackle the disease. But what happens if a machine is the one making a diagnosis?

And the winner is...

While teams will have to navigate those questions eventually, first they have to make something that works. First-, second- and third-prize winners will be announced in January 2016, on the 50th anniversary of the debut of "Star Trek." Get ready to see a whole new wave of devices designed to help you live long and prosper.

Dara Kerr contributed to this story, which appears in the summer edition of CNET Magazine. For other magazine stories, go here .

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'Star Trek’ tricorder becomes reality (and other healthcare innovations)

While story-based tech innovation doesn’t always pan out, it sometimes does-and it usually changes everything.

Editor's Note:   Welcome to Medical Economics' blog section which features contributions from members of the medical community. These blogs are an opportunity for bloggers to engage with readers about a topic that is top of mind, whether it is practice management, experiences with patients, the industry, medicine in general, or healthcare reform. The opinions expressed here are that of the authors and not UBM / Medical Economics.

When given enough time, science fiction sometimes becomes science fact. Only a few decades ago, artificial intelligence (AI) was nothing more than a concept in forward-thinking sci-fi novels. While story-based tech innovation doesn’t always pan out (most of us are still waiting for functional hover boards and flying cars), it sometimes does-and it usually changes everything.

That’s why, for the past 10 years, Qualcomm has sponsored the  $2.5 million XPrize  to bring the "Star Trek" medical tricorder to life. The winner, Final Frontier Medical Devices (now  Basil Leaf Technologies ), exhibited a working, AI-driven prototype named DxtER that may finally make the tricorder a reality-and help change everything we knew about healthcare’s future.

How the  DxtER  tricorder works

The tricorder from the popular TV and movie series "Star Trek" was a multi-function device that could scan and analyze anything. The handheld scanner could tell its user what elements were in an alien environment, the DNA structures of alien species and much more. It could also be used to scan medical patients and provide immediate, comprehensive diagnoses of any condition or disease.

The idea of an all-around instant scanner is exciting, but the medical applications are what the AI-driven  tricorder prototype , DxtER, has proven possible. It’s a combination of smart tools, including a digital stethoscope, wrist sensor, chest sensor, spirometer and blood pressure calibrator, that feeds an AI program data to provide accurate diagnoses.

The program fits onto an iPad mini or any current smartphone or tablet, and the sensors use technology similar to that of glucose readers that don’t draw blood. It could be convenient enough for patients to use at home and can diagnose up to 34 medical conditions, including anemia, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia, hypertension, asthma and bronchitis.

A disruptive future for healthcare

Innovations like the tricorder don’t come around often because it takes a culmination of advanced technologies to make them possible. Together, the technologies that have led us to this point paint a much more disruptive picture of healthcare’s future than we ever imagined. For example, these three technologies create a more comprehensive patient experience:

1. Portable diagnostic devices

The fact that the tricorder stems from one of the most popular sci-fi sagas of all time is fascinating, but the real-world implications of  portable diagnostic devices  are even more impressive. Patients can avoid unnecessary hospital visits by analyzing their symptoms or virtually sending detailed data to their healthcare teams in real time. Portable hardware and AI-powered software that fits on most consumer devices give patients significant power over their healthcare choices.

Doctors can also expand their services without financially burdening their organizations. In a hospital setting, a handheld scanner may not provide the precise details needed to form a treatment plan, but it can help providers save time and lives by more quickly pinpointing what tests are necessary and what treatment options are most appropriate.

2. AI-powered medical assistants

The crux of the tricorder’s value is that it provides physicians and patients with vital healthcare data almost instantly. That’s the same idea that makes AI-powered medical assistants valuable. Smart chatbots can answer important questions that patients would normally ask their doctors. If patients experience unexpected symptoms or have questions about their conditions, they can engage with a chatbot instead of inundating their physicians with questions.

Unlike the bots that consumers frequently encounter (and become frustrated with) when dealing with retail companies,  medical chatbots  learn from the expertise of various providers and experiences with patients. They can guide patients to identify and understand their needs without taking time from human customer support teams or healthcare personnel.

3. Virtual hospital visitors

Chatting with an intelligent, almost humanlike bot can vastly improve patient interaction, but for patients who are hospitalized, virtual reality (VR) can be a much more engaging option. Organizations are already using VR to help patients through chronic pain management, therapy for neurological disorders, traumatic brain injuries and long hospital stays.

For instance,  VR applications  that generate virtual, interactive characters help spur social interaction for children with autism. Patients confined to a hospital bed benefit from being able to virtually interact with family and friends as though they were at home. The application takes their mind out of the four walls of the hospital so they can relax and recover more successfully.

A look ahead

The rise in AI, machine learning and VR will likely force healthcare to evolve in ways that we haven’t thought of yet. While exciting, that prospect also raises important questions that should guide how we implement the technologies. Elon Musk, who co-founded a research group to look into the  ethics of AI , has warned that it’s never too early to make sure this advanced technology “benefits all of humanity.”

Providers must ask certain questions-and ask them relentlessly. Will one-off or infrequent biases contribute to algorithms (i.e., the way the tool "thinks")? Healthcare is both science and ethics; will these AI-driven tools be able to recognize and accommodate for such a nuanced balance? These are the questions any organization in any field has to ask, but they become even more imperative when it's patients' well-being on the line.

Technologies like the tricorder should, however, benefit us overall. In sci-fi stories, technology often plays vital roles in society, for better or worse. When turning that technology into real life, such as the tricorder, we can make sure it’s mostly better by focusing on how it can vastly improve healthcare outcomes and the overall patient experience. As with any new technology, so long as we keep a patient-first mindset, we (and those we care for) will quickly be able to reap the benefits.

Jeff Heenan-Jalil  is the senior vice president and global head of Health Business for  Wipro Limited .  Outside of Wipro, he is a board member of Digital Square, an organization that aims to empower countries to develop sustainable national digital infrastructures. The views expressed in this article are Jeff's, and his employer does not subscribe to the substance or veracity of Jeff's views.

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Interview with , part of the show could we ever colonise mars.

Mark - The Diagnostics Development Unit is a unit which attempts to do non-invasive diagnosis of disease ultimately. We're doing that through three different methodologies, going back to what ancient medicine did in terms of looking at a patient, smelling a patient, and feeling the pulse of a patient.

Georgia - It smells people, it looks at people. Why is this better than the traditional way of diagnosing illnesses?

Mark - The idea of this is that some tests take hours for the results to come back and you get some information without sticking needles in them, with the complications of infection and stuff like that which aids the clinician in terms of actually doing their work, treating the patient earlier, perhaps ruling out some things, and ultimately, perhaps even diagnosing given conditions. But before we get there, we need to know what a normal human being is and what signals or data you would associate with this each of the different types of measurement for a different condition. The hope is once we know what a normal patient looks like and we know what some of these conditions are like, we can come up with a real firm probability, it's X, Y, Z. We're a few years away from that. At the moment, we're analysing the individual data and we're going to need some help from some mathematicians and artificial intelligence experts in order to put this together and actually get it to work. And become something which ultimately, won't just be in hospitals perhaps in the GP surgery. Perhaps even in a chemist, perhaps even at home ultimately if you get the price of these gadgets down low enough.

Georgia - Can I see some of this in action?

Mark - Certainly can, yes.

Georgia - The DDU is based deep in the hospital where it's been operational for a few years gathering data. It's basically a small cupboard chockfull of expensive looking scanners and monitors designed to look, smell, and feel their patients.

Lisa - I'm Lisa McLelland, the research nurse for the DDU. You're looking at the mass spectrometer which does the smells bit like a sniff of a dog. The compounds that it's actually been picking up is, it has a tendency to be able to pick up cancer and sepsises, infections throughout your breath, just through the molecules that travel around through these two pieces of equipment, breathing in and out pipes, travel all the way back around the machine, and back into the computer.

Georgia - Once you've been smelled to check you're all shipshape, the machine needs to take a look at you. So next stop in the DDU's medical arsenal, we've got the thermal imager.

Lisa - Mark, if you want to put your hand on the wall. So, with the camera.

Georgia - Wow! Okay. We're looking on the back of the camera. There's a screen and you can see this glowing orange handprint.

Mark - You can actually see the temperature difference from my hand on the wall when I remove it. So, that small change in temperature is enough to actually be picked up by modern technology and it's also great in terms of the spatial resolution as well so you can tell fine structure in the skin. You can look at whether people are undergoing shutdown i.e. the blood is retreating into the core. As it does, that's when the classic symptoms are going from fever into the so-called state of sepsis which is severe infection.

Georgia - So, you smell good, you look healthy, the machine still needs to have a good feel.

Mark - Just behind is the bioimpedance thoracic monitor. That actually came out of the space programme. It's developed in the 1960s for the Apollo astronauts to try and come up with a method of actually seeing how well their hearts were beating without lots of sensors. Essentially, what it does is it measures the electrical resistance in your body and that changes as the blood flows around your system basically. By looking at the change in resistance, you can tell how well the heart is beating, et cetera.

Georgia - It seems like some of this kit has already proven its use in space. So, is this what the first Martians should consider taking with them?

Mark - Part of the problem which nobody has really solved or cracked is that if you have a long expedition to mars or wherever in the Solar System, how do you keep your astronauts healthy. What would you if they're non-healthy? The great problem is how do you treat them medically. The nearest hospital might be 100 million miles away or 150 million miles away depending on where you are in the orbit. Astronauts tend to be very, very healthy people. Scott Kelley for example is on the International Space Station. He'll be up there for a year. So a year is probably not an issue, but if you're talking of sending people to mars to form a colony on the surface then who knows.

Georgia - What kind of things - do people get colds in space? What kind of things do you imagine astronauts will be having to deal with?

Mark - I mean, people get colds in space. The body fluid distribution changes, their heart pump and action changes. It looks like viruses and bacteria become more virulent in space for reasons we don't understand. So, certainly infection is a potential problem. On another planet, it might be broken bones. You might even need surgery. People develop conditions which you have to operate on. Otherwise, the only alternative is perhaps a painful death.

Georgia - Are there plans to miniaturise some of this equipment and maybe contain it all in one piece?

Mark - Essentially, yes. The hope is that by studying these patients, you can narrow what you need to look at down. We already know some of the technologies to miniaturise some of those pieces of equipment. The question with miniaturisation is, will it ever be sensitive enough to replace these quite expensive research great pieces of equipment?

Georgia - I guess if you're going to mars, beggars can't be choosers. They don't have a lot of room to work with.

Mark - That's correct. In the spacecraft, you want minimum mass, minimum volume, minimum power. What do you take on a mission to mars? Do you take an x-ray machine, an ultrasound machine, you take some of this equipment or what? Over the next few years, hopefully, that will be sorted out before we send astronauts to the red planet.

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Tricorder Tech: That Star Trek Medical Scanner Is Getting Much Closer

Editor’s note: If you search for a definition for tricorder you’ll find things like this from Wikipedia: “A tricorder is a fictional handheld sensor that exists in the Star Trek universe. The tricorder is a multifunctional hand-held device that can perform environmental scans, data recording, and data analysis; hence the word “tricorder” to refer to the three functions of sensing, recording, and computing.” You’ll also see the term openly used for contemporary medical devices that are used to do quick tests of someone’s health or some mineral’s composition. In Star Trek a physician usually had a smaller device that was connected to a larger tricorder to scan humans for their health status.

Indeed there is already an actual tricorder market in contemporary commerce. If you look at this recent marketing report “ Medical Tricorder Market – Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, Regional Outlook, and Forecast 2023 – 2032 “ The authors claim “The global medical tricorder market size was valued at USD 4 billion in 2022 and is expected to hit around USD 12.7 billion by 2032, growing at a registered CAGR of 12.3% during the forecast period 2023 to 2032.” Their definition of the market: “A medical tricorder is a handheld and a portable scanning device which is used by various consumers to diagnose medical conditions and take the basic body vital measurements within seconds. The market for the medical tricorder is expected to grow during the forecast period due to various cardiovascular diseases and an increase in the awareness of these diseases among the patients.”

In an era of ubiquitous smartphones we’re now expecting more and more functionality with every new model that is released. As we move closer to sending humans to other worlds to search for life, such a device that falls under the general “tricorder” classification would certainly come in handy. Here’s an example of a device – a medical scanner” that you can buy today.

MedWand™ Solutions, Inc. is Transforming Telemedicine with Award-Winning Device and VirtualCare Platform, Now Available

Transforming the current understanding of telemedicine, MedWand combines multiple clinically accurate vitals sensors and an Ultra-HD resolution camera into one, handheld, lightweight device.

Representing a breakthrough in miniaturization and accuracy of medical sensors, MedWand supports eleven examinations required for a comprehensive virtual examination of patient.

MedWand Solutions, Inc. is pleased to announce that the company’s groundbreaking MedWand device and VirtualCare ecosystem is commercially available to enable clinical exams with its comprehensive care solutions. Poised to transform the current capabilities of telemedicine, Medwand is offering various kits including: the MedWand Evaluation Kit, the MedWand Mobile Clinic, and the MedWand Remote Clinic. By facilitating a more comprehensive assessment of a patient’s health and an extensive remote diagnosis, Medwand provides the crucial missing link in the delivery of telemedicine. To request a demo today visit www.medwand.com . “I am happy to share that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted 510(k) clearance to the MedWand,” shared MedWand CEO and Co-Founder, Robert Rose. “As a company dedicated to advancing access to quality healthcare, we are proud to offer our innovative solutions to medical facilities worldwide to help lower operating costs, improve health equity, and ultimately save lives.” MedWand has already received widespread interest within the telehealth industry and medical community.

The award-winning company is currently rolling out its solution through strategic partnerships with major health systems, physician groups, and telehealth companies with the below kits:

• MedWand Evaluation Kit- Designed for clinical evaluation of the MedWand device and ecosystem.
• MedWand Mobile Clinic- Designed for physician or home visits and remote patient monitoring applications.
• MedWand Remote Clinic- Designed for remote / regional clinics, transport, and industrial application.

*Prices start as low as $120/month including all hardware, software, and cloud services. Please contact MedWand Sales to request a complimentary quotation. “When it comes to medical diagnostics, clinical accuracy is not just important, but critical, and MedWand’s goal has always been to be the most clinically-dependable telemedicine device in the world,” shared Samir Qamar, MD, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer. “With FDA clearance, clinicians and patients everywhere can trust MedWand’s vitals and remote examination tools, and experience telemedicine on an entirely new level.”

Transforming the current understanding of telemedicine, MedWand combines multiple clinically accurate vitals sensors and an Ultra-HD resolution camera into one, handheld, lightweight device. Data collected include core temperature, blood oxygen saturation and pulse rate, heart, lung and abdominal auscultations, electrocardiogram*, and high definition otoscopic, oropharynx, and dermatoscopic exam images. MedWand VirtualCare Clinic can also provide blood pressure, glucometer, spirometry, weight, and body mass data by instantly connecting to FDA-cleared third party tools.

MedWand’s Virtual Care Clinic software provides a link between MedWand devices and existing Electronic Medical Record and Practice Management Software. Supporting single password sign-in, accepting externally scheduled appointments, and exchanging patient data with the EMR, the Virtual Care Clinic software goes beyond video consultation by offering a comprehensive remote exam. Delivering a unique combination of video consultation, live monitoring, and remote clinical-grade vitals capture, MedWand also provides a platform for future AI based vitals data analysis to enable cost efficient and comprehensive telemedicine services for medical facilities worldwide.

The ergonomic MedWand device and its associated software applications were created by a team of physicians and medical device engineers to enhance the quality and accessibility of health care services for clinicians and patients, regardless of physical location. The company offers MedWand and Virtual Care Clinic solutions for applications that include hospitals, field clinics, nursing homes, schools, and workplaces, wherever Internet access is available.

When patient care depends on telemedicine, choose MedWand. For more information on MedWand visit www.medwand.com . To schedule a private demonstration or to request a formal product quotation please contact MedWand at www.medwand.com/contact.html . For more information on MedWand visit www.medwand.com .

*Electrocardiogram feature is available in select countries, currently awaiting US FDA 510(k) clearance.

About MedWand Solutions, Inc MedWand Solutions, Inc. is FDA-approved device and ecosystem that delivers digital healthcare technologies to enhance the accessibility and quality of healthcare services for clinicians and patients, regardless of location. MedWand was created by a team of physicians and engineers to enhance the quality and accessibility of health care services regardless of physical location. The company will offer its MedWand device, Virtual Care Clinic, and cloud based universal AI diagnostic platform for a wide range of applications that include hospitals, field clinics, nursing homes, schools, and workplaces, wherever Internet access is available.

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Star Trek: The Original Series: Dr. McCoy's medical tricorder becomes reality

Star Trek: The Original Series introduced a medical tricorder that allowed Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy to detect and diagnose basic injuries and medical conditions. 

On Star Trek: The Original Series, it wasn't unusual to see Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) move a handheld scanner over an injured crewmate's body. If Bones didn't say "He's dead, Jim," then he would give a diagnois of the patient. His medical tricorder afforded him that opportunity, and we haven't had anything like that in modern medicine until now.

Now, MedWand, a creation of a team of physicians and medical device engineers, is crossing over into Star Trek territory with a lightweight handheld device and an Ultra-HD resolution camera that allows health practitioners to collect data faster and in areas otherwise unavailable without the use of CT scans or MRIs.

According to a media release to Business Wire , MedWand's capabilities include "collecting data including core temperature, blood oxygen saturation and pulse rate, heart, lung and abdominal auscultations, electrocardiogram*, and high definition otoscopic, oropharynx, and dermatoscopic exam images. MedWand VirtualCare Clinic can also provide blood pressure, glucometer, spirometry, weight, and body mass data by instantly connecting to FDA-cleared third party tools." See it in action in the video below!

Medwand has already received  FDA 510(k) clearance and will help clinicians perform remote exams anywhere in the world. And this is only the beginning.

We know Star Trek has influenced many technological advancements over the years, and this one could help save lives. Imagine something we thought was just a prop when we first saw The Original Series becoming a reality that will make a real difference in this world! There is no denying that Trek was way ahead of its time, and Gene Roddenberry created a franchise that would not only entertain but inspire!

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FLASHlight MRI in real time—a step towards Star Trek medicine

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This work describes a dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique for local scanning of the human body with use of a handheld receive coil or coil array. Real-time MRI is based on highly undersampled radial gradient-echo sequences with joint reconstructions of serial images and coil sensitivity maps by regularized nonlinear inversion (NLINV). For this proof-of-concept study, a fixed slice position and field-of-view (FOV) were predefined from the operating console, while a local receive coil (array) is moved across the body—for the sake of simplicity by the subject itself. Experimental realizations with a conventional 3 T magnet comprise dynamic anatomic imaging of the head, thorax and abdomen of healthy volunteers. Typically, the image resolution was 0.75 to 1.5 mm with 3 to 6 mm section thickness and acquisition times of 33 to 100 ms per frame. However, spatiotemporal resolutions and contrasts are highly variable and may be adjusted to clinical needs. In summary, the proposed FLASHlight MRI method provides a robust acquisition and reconstruction basis for future diagnostic strategies that mimic the usage of ultrasound. Necessary extensions for this vision require remote control of all sequence parameters by a person at the scanner as well as the design of more flexible gradients and magnets.

Introduction

A medical tricorder is standard equipment in Star Trek science fiction movies. It allows the user to perform noninvasive and even contactless scans of the human body by moving a small handheld instrument over the tissue or organ of interest while offering detailed biological, chemical and physical information for diagnostic purposes. In principle, current magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies should be able to perform at least part of these tasks with suitable modifications to the imaging process as well as gradient and magnet hardware. Here, we propose first steps towards tricorder-like imaging by describing a solution for the acquisition and reconstruction process which allows for interactive real-time MRI with use of a local receiver coil. At this stage, i.e., within a conventional horizontal-bore MRI system, the handheld coil is freely moveable across the human body while the underlying field-of-view (FOV) and slice position are still controlled from the operating console. Experimental demonstrations comprise dynamic anatomic imaging of the brain, heart, liver and kidney of healthy subjects. Current limitations and necessary extensions are discussed.

All MRI measurements are performed at 3 T (Magnetom Prisma fit, Siemens Healthineers, Erlangen, Germany) with use of a standard 7 and 11 cm diameter single-turn loop coil or a 4-channel “small flex” coil array of the vendor. Though possible, a combination with elements of the underlying spine coil was deliberately discarded to exclusively explore the potential of handheld receive coils. Subjects without known illness were recruited among the students of the local university. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (as revised in 2013). Ethical approval was obtained from the ethics committee of the Göttingen University School of Medicine and written informed consent was obtained from all subjects prior to MRI.

FLASHlight MRI is accomplished by highly undersampled radial gradient-echo sequences as previously developed for serial imaging with radial trajectories, for details see ( 1 - 4 ). Radiofrequency excitation involves the body coil, while data acquisition is performed with a receiver coil which may be freely moved across the body—at this stage within a predefined FOV. Depending on the user-selectable parameters of the gradient-echo sequence the proposed method offers access to spin density and T1 contrast for spoiled FLASH with randomized radiofrequency spoiling ( 5 ) or to T2/T1 contrast for refocused FLASH or fully balanced steady-state free precessing (SSFP) conditions as controlled by respective gradient switching schemes. Further variants are obtainable by adding interleaved fat suppression ( 6 , 7 ) or spatial pre-saturation modules ( 8 ). Extensions based on phase-contrast MRI principles allow for quantitative flow measurements in real time ( 9 - 11 ). Here, the achievable image quality for future diagnostic or interventional imaging scenarios is demonstrated by exemplary anatomic real-time MRI studies of the head, thorax and abdomen. Table 1 summarizes respective protocols and acquisition parameters.

MRI, magnetic resonance imaging; FOV, field-of-view; TR, repetition time; TE, echo time.

Serial image reconstructions of FLASHlight acquisitions represent a nonlinear inverse problem. This is because the movement of a receive coil across heterogeneous conductive body tissues is associated with a continuous change of both the image content and the associated coil sensitivity maps. This also applies if multi-coil arrays are replaced by a single-element receive coil. Accordingly, both the desired image and the actual sensitivity map(s) have to be determined for each frame—a task readily accomplished by nonlinear inversion (NLINV) as described ( 1 ).

For real-time MRI the radial encoding scheme uses complementary sets of spokes in typically 5 successive frames. This feature improves the regularized nonlinear inverse problem which exploits temporal (or spatial) similarity of neighboring images ( 1 ). Post-processing involves a temporal median filter the duration of which matches the number of frames with different sets of spokes. The filter is characterized by retaining “edges”, i.e., relevant signal intensity changes. Its general influence on temporal fidelity and spatial accuracy has been investigated ( 3 ). Final image denoising takes advantage of a modified non-local means filter ( 12 ).

Because radiofrequency transmission is accomplished by the body coil, FLASHlight MRI is insensitive to potential changes in B1. Alternatively, local transmit-receive coils automatically ensure B1 excitation at the chosen image location. Moreover, the technique does not suffer from B0 inhomogeneities, so that applications not even require shimming. This is because of the use of high bandwidths and correspondingly short echo times of the radial gradient-echo images.

Online NLINV reconstruction and display of real-time images with negligible latency is achieved with use of a bypass computer (Sysgen, Bremen, Germany) equipped with 4 graphical processing units (NVIDIA V100 SXM2, Santa Clara, CA, USA) and connected to the MRI scanner by a 1 GBit link. Its action is “invisible” to the operator as all sequences are realized in close similarity to vendor protocols and all images are displayed as regular DICOM images on the scanner and stored in the usual databank [for availability see ( 13 )].

The speed and type of movement of the receive coil turned out to be not critical for the NLINV reconstruction which exploits the similarity of the actual image to the previous image. A rapid move of the coil to a distant spot degrades the image quality for only a few intermediate frames before stabilizing again.

Figure 1 and Video 1 present a FLASHlight MRI study of the human brain at 100 ms temporal resolution. The T2/T1 contrast of the real-time images is a preferred option for diagnostic purposes and obtained by a refocused FLASH sequence. Both the selected frames and the 40 s video demonstrate how the sensitivity of a 7 cm loop coil is shifted within a fixed transverse plane when the subject moves the handheld coil around the head. The images exhibit a steep intensity gradient as their transverse orientation is perpendicular to the plane of the flat surface coil. This situation is different for studies of the thorax and abdomen where the coronal image orientation closely matches the plane of the handheld coil(s). Figure 2 and Video 2 highlight the aorta and beating heart with use of a T1-weighted image series at 33.3 ms resolution. The subject moves a handheld 11 cm loop coil atop the thorax along a counter-clockwise trajectory around the heart concomitantly shifting the coil sensitivity within the chosen bulbus view. Figure 3 and Video 3 cover the upper abdomen depicting parts of the heart, liver, kidney, spleen and stomach in an oblique coronal plane. In this example, the T1-weighted images at 33.3 ms resolution are acquired with a 4-channel coil array offering an even larger sensitivity field than the 11 cm loop coil.

Selected T2/T1-weighted images of a 40 s FLASHlight MRI acquisition (7 cm loop coil) covering the head of a healthy subject at 100.0 ms temporal resolution. For further details see Table 1 . MRI, magnetic resonance imaging.

T2/T1-weighted FLASHlight MRI movie (40 s) covering various positions around the brain of a healthy subject at 100.0 ms temporal resolution. For further details see Table 1 . MRI, magnetic resonance imaging.

Selected T1-weighted images of a 60 s FLASHlight MRI acquisition (11 cm loop coil) covering the thorax of a healthy subject at 33.3 ms temporal resolution. For further details see Table 1 . MRI, magnetic resonance imaging.

T1-weighted FLASHlight MRI movie (60 s) covering various positions within the thorax of a healthy subject at 33.3 ms temporal resolution. For further details see Table 1 . MRI, magnetic resonance imaging.

Selected T1-weighted images of a 60 s FLASHlight MRI acquisition (4-channel small flex coil) covering the upper abdomen of a healthy subject at 33.3 ms temporal resolution. For further details see Table 1 . MRI, magnetic resonance imaging.

T1-weighted FLASHlight MRI movie (60 s) covering various positions within the upper abdomen of a healthy subject at 33.3 ms temporal resolution. For further details see Table 1 . MRI, magnetic resonance imaging.

During the past 25 years several attempts have been made to bring MRI into the operating theater, e.g., see a list of selected examples describing software and hardware tools ( 14 - 21 ). The present work complements and extends these ideas by describing an acquisition and reconstruction approach for serial imaging which may serve as a universal and robust solution for the MRI part. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first MRI report about the use of a freely moveable receive coil or coil array, while the underlying real-time MRI technology has been established since more than 10 years and successfully applied in many clinical fields, e.g., see ( 4 , 22 ). The experimental demonstrations represent a proof-of-concept of dynamic MRI with a handheld receiver coil which mimics the usage of ultrasound. The results support the notion that recent advances in MRI data acquisition and reconstruction are able to successfully treat the acquisition and reconstruction problem encountered in future interactive MRI scenarios. Of course, FLASHlight MRI represents only one of many elements required for dealing with the entire process (see below), but it solves the MRI part and hence brings us closer to the vision of a functioning “medical tricorder”.

The approach promises a variety of potential applications and technical variants that need to be examined. Once flexible open-structured MRI hardware becomes available FLASHlight MRI will allow for interactive real-time monitoring of interventional procedures such as a biopsy with optimized signal-to-noise ratio and spatiotemporal resolution. The method is also expected to simplify the investigation of speech and swallowing processes as well as of movements of the temporomandibular joint, shoulder, hand, knee and foot. Studies are easily extended to musculoskeletal problems (e.g., arm, thigh, and leg) and abdominal questions (e.g., small bowel and prostate). Moreover, foreseeable extensions include fetal imaging. On the technical side further developments range from the use of transmit-receive coils to flow analyses based on velocity-encoded phase-contrast MRI. At this stage the straightforward extension to real-time flow MRI is already possible but slightly too slow for interactive real-time applications. This is because the preferred methodology ( 9 - 11 ) is based on a model-based reconstruction technique, which directly estimates the anatomic image and corresponding velocity map from the two flow-encoded datasets and therefore avoids any phase subtraction and associated salt-and-pepper noise in image parts without MRI signal support. Though accelerated via graphical processing unit (GPU) implementation the online reconstruction speed for real-time flow MRI does not yet fully reach the typical FLASHlight speed of 10 to 30 fps.

So far, all FLASHlight MRI demonstrations employed a single cross-sectional slice. However, the technique allows for simultaneous multi-slice acquisitions both in parallel and orthogonal orientations. Although at the expense of temporal resolution, slice-interleaved acquisitions maintain the same temporal footprint (i.e., acquisition time) and thus avoid temporal blurring. In fact, even volumetric scans are possible with use of a novel method for rapid volume coverage that exploits the same NLINV reconstruction as for dynamic real-time MRI ( 23 ). It relies on a cross-sectional real-time acquisition where the slice position of each frame is automatically shifted by a certain percentage of the slice thickness. Such motion-robust volumetric scans take only a few seconds and may be an option for repetitive scanning of a target tissue.

The current implementation suffers from several limitations. First of all, the used MRI system is a regular horizontal-bore scanner without any equipment for remote control of sequence parameters. This particularly refers to a dynamic change of the FOV in order to enhance the spatial resolution or a change of image contrast at a target spot. More general restrictions that need to be overcome in order to accomplish ultrasound-like (or Star Trek-like) MRI diagnostics or interventions comprise a variety of hardware elements. These include local gradient coils as well as open or even portable magnet structures, eventually based on novel high-temperature superconducting materials. In principle, individual technologies are already available, but it remains to be seen how to bring these elements together.

In summary, the proposed FLASHlight MRI technique provides a robust acquisition and reconstruction basis for future diagnostic strategies that allow for tricorder-like MRI scanning.

Supplementary

Acknowledgments.

Funding: None.

Ethical Statement : The authors are accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (as revised in 2013). Ethical approval was obtained from the ethics committee of the Göttingen University School of Medicine and written informed consent was obtained from all subjects prior to MRI.

Conflicts of Interest: All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at https://qims.amegroups.com/article/view/10.21037/qims-22-648/coif ). DV and JF report that they are co-inventors of a patent describing the MRI method used here. The other authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

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Made of machined aluminium, the tricorder scanner has a bare metal finish with red and green LEDs embedded in the head. When the brass switch on the unit is pressed, the green LEDs around the edge are activated in a swirling motion, while the red LED at the head of the unit activates. The head unscrews, allowing access to the battery fitted in the unit’s interior.

The tricorder scanner remains in a very good production-used condition with minimal wear from use on the show.

Click play on the video below to see the scanner in action!

• Size Item size: 2.95" × 0.98" × 0.98" (7.5cm × 2.5cm × 2.5cm)

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Done / Completed   Original Star Trek Medical Scanner with sound

• Thread starter FXArtist
• Start date Mar 24, 2017
• Tags star trek star trek the original series

Well-Known Member

• Mar 24, 2017

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renaissance_man

Master member.

• Mar 25, 2017

Looks really good! If I had the disposable income I'd love to pick on up, despite not being a huge TOS props fan this does look like it would fit in nicely with my Star Trek prop collection. Good luck with the run.  

• Mar 27, 2017

Sorry... I put the price wrong. lowered now.  

Hi FXArtist, When would these be ready and what would the shipping cost to Canada? Thanks!  

• Mar 29, 2017

pretzel399 Shipping to Canada shouldn't be over $35 and they are all ready to ship now.  

• Apr 4, 2017

only 3 left  

• May 12, 2017

only 2 left  

Elderscrollsfan

• May 14, 2017

Wow, cool replicas!  

• May 19, 2017

last one.  

ApostleofColor

• Jul 7, 2018

I would love to buy it, if you still have it.  

Kunothewild

• Dec 20, 2020

Boy am I really really late to this party. If you still have one I'd love to buy it.  

I am sorry friends, but they are long gone.  

Your message may be considered spam for the following reasons:

• This thread hasn't been active in some time. A new post in this thread might not contribute constructively to this discussion after so long.

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You can now beam up your own 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' Medical Scanner and Hypospray collectibles

Someone call Dr. Crusher.

" Star Trek " fans will soon be able to live long and prosper in good health with Factory Entertainment's latest collectible, a prop replica set of Dr. Crusher's medical kit from "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

The 1:1 scale Medical Scanner and Hypospray replicas are limited edition and are expected to ship in the spring of 2022. The Hypospray features interchangeable vials and electronic sound effects whilst the Medical or "Hand" Scanner features both electronic sound and light effects, both are made with heavy diecast metal bodies. 

The museum quality replicas normally retail for $399.99 but Trek fans and collectors who order before Aug. 9 will receive a discounted price of $374.99.

Related: The best Star Trek gifts and deals for 2021 More: 'Star Trek: Discovery' season 3 Blu-ray sneak peek  

The original props made appearances in " Star Trek: The Next Generation " as well as " Star Trek: Deep Space Nine " and " Star Trek: Voyager " and the collectables company has directly copied surviving resources from the CBS archives to ensure complete accuracy. 

These replicas each numbered replica set will come with a cast metal plaque, a wooden presentation case and a certificate of authenticity and prop story booklet.

In Star Trek medical lore, Hand Scanner contained sensors which allowed it to collect and analyze a wide range of medical diagnostic readings. The Hypospray, meanwhile, used aerosuspension to deliver different types of medication, and was used to collect and store different air samples. 

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Both replica props require 3 LR44 batteries to operate and they are included in the set. 

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Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

STAFF WRITER, E-commerce — Alex joined Space.com in June 2021 as staff writer covering space news, games, tech, toys and deals. Based in London, U.K. Graduating in June 2020, Alex studied Sports Journalism in the North East of England at Sunderland University. During his studies and since his graduation, Alex has been featured in local newspapers and online publications covering a range of sports from university rugby to Premier League soccer. In addition to a background in sports and journalism, Alex has a life-long love of Star Wars which started with watching the prequel trilogy and collecting toy lightsabers, he also grew up spending most Saturday evenings watching Doctor Who. 

Contact Alexander: E-Mail   Twitter

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Medical scanner

Ruth sets off the scanner.

The medical scanner was a medical device utilized by Starfleet medical personnel during the 2260s . Similar in size and function to the hand scanner of the medical tricorder , the medical scanner was a small, portable unit designed to function separately from the tricorder and diagnose by means of auditory emissions.

With this device, a trained physician could diagnose an illness by scanning the patient and interpreting the sounds it produced to diagnose, for example, arthritis . ( TOS : " The Deadly Years "). One hand-scanner of this type was used by Spock when he read an energy source on the bridge, ascertaining that Elaan 's necklace of "common stones" was actually dilithium . ( TOS : " Elaan of Troyius ") It was phased out as integration between the scanner and the medical tricorder became more advanced and commonplace.

Radioactive elements or other chemicals could set off the scanners. In 2266 , Ruth Bonaventure set off Leonard McCoy 's medical scanner just by walking past it, prompting him to ask whether she was wearing an unusual perfume or something radioactive. Later, he doubted that the unusually beautiful women were alien illusions, saying that any alien smart enough to do so would also be able to prevent his scanner from "going beep." ( TOS : " Mudd's Women ")

To accurately take readings of non- Human individuals, the scanner would have to be recalibrated. McCoy mentioned this to Spock in 2269 when the Vulcan returned from a trip to his past . Spock informed him that he was lucky, because if times were different, he'd have to recalibrate for an Andorian ( first officer Thelin in an alternate timeline). McCoy didn't understand what he meant by that, having lost all memory of what had occurred. ( TAS : " Yesteryear ")

Another medical scanner in use was the alien scanner used by Dr. Joseph M'Benga , a cylindrical device to diagnose a gravely wounded Spock, after the latter had been shot in the back by the Hill People , who had been given flintlock-style rifles by the Klingons. ( TOS : " A Private Little War ")

This scanner consists of two parts; a grooved metal cylindrical scanner head with a small off-center light at the top of the unit that changed colors every rotation, indicating what type of scanning signal it was using, two switches on its side, and the main body / computer, encased in a pebbled rubberized grip.

It was not only a medical scanner, set to diagnose humanoid or otherwise life forms, but may also be utilized as a companion / probe to the science tricorder.

Like the smaller hand-held medical scanner utilized by Dr. McCoy, this scanner lacks a visual display on the endcap, and was interpreted according to the sound emitted from the device.

A scanner of this type was seen in Sickbay, used by Dr. Janet Wallace , when Captain Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Mr. Scott were exposed to a foreign element on the planet they had visited, which caused them to age rapidly. ( TOS : " The Deadly Years ")

In 2371 , B'Elanna Torres described the Vidiian bio-probe as a very sophisticated medical scanner and surgical instrument. ( VOY : " Phage ")

• 1 USS Voyager (NCC-74656-A)
• 2 Star Trek: Prodigy
• 3 Daniels (Crewman)

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Default title

Star-trek medical scanner-ish.flac.

September 24th, 2014

reminiscent of the medical-scanner on the 1960's Star-Trek TV series.

Flac (.flac)

Sample rate

2 years, 11 months ago

to boldly go where no sound has gone before...

9 years, 5 months ago

perfect for some trap, thanks

9 years, 9 months ago

• 664 downloads