Just in case there is someone on this site who isn’t a Trekkie somehow: In Star Trek the all purpose device they use for scanning and other similar things is a Tricorder. One of the applications is medical. You scan someone with this and can get most of the info you might need to diagnose and treat conditions.
I recently had to get some rather invasive tests and it just got me wondering if such a thing is hypothetically possible in the future. What are the barriers that stop us from doing something like that for now/ever? We already have some tests that use waves to image parts of the body like X-rays or MRIs. Is it just complete fantasy to imagine such tests for other parts or functions of the body?
Edited to fix a typo and to clarify that I’m mostly talking about the part where they can remotely scan someone instead of having to stick something in or take something out. The miniaturization is cool, but kind of secondary. I’d take having to go to a doctor and sitting in the equivalent of an MRI machine if it meant not having to get poked and prodded.
Smartwatches today can check blood oxygen level, blood pressure, and heart rate just by aiming a light at the wrist.
Dogs can smell certain diseases. I don’t the state of the tech but scent detectors for airport security are being developed. I see no reason these couldn’t be used in a medical setting.
Some of the CAT line of phones have an infrared camera.
I don’t know when, but it seems possible eventually.
Just in case there is someone on this site who isn’t a Trekkie somehow
Thank you for the explaination, I am the one and only Lemmy user who hasn’t seen Star Trek :P
No you’re not! :D
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
What about a dermal regenerator…
Not plausible at all is the answer.
Also fixing everything with a tiny prick that doesn’t even sting. They changed that a bit on Strange New Worlds though, patients wince.
It’s science fiction, it’s the future, here’s a knife that toasts bread while you slice it!
As far as I’m aware there’s not really a feasible path to miniaturization for most of the current medical scanning technologies. Physics and materials science are fundamental barriers.
Will smaller medical diagnostics be developed? Yes.
Will we see a fully realized tricorder in our lifetime? Probably not.
There was an x prize for a tricorder about a decade back; they found that to accomplish all the tasks, they actually needed three sets of hardware, two of which needed to be strapped on to the person.
Tricorder was able to tell if someone was pregnant…c’mon now.
If you’re asking how feasible is a handheld device with a shitton of sensors? Fairly doable. Providing sustainable energy to something like that with current tech…not so much.
I guess the portable part is less what I was interested in than the possibility of being able to diagnose more things just by waving some sensors over the body instead of needing to cut someone open or stick a camera in them or take some blood, etc.
In that realm, there’s not a whole lot we can without actual touch with current tech.
We have handheld Portable X-Rays that are about the size of an old digital camera, but you’d probably want something with the resolution of an MR, and the smallest of those at current is about the size of a large trashcan (which is still pretty cool).
If you include basic contact with the device, we can detect Blood Oxygen, Glucose, 12-lead equivalent EKG, some hormones, some infections (rapid detection for cutaneous), and some level of internal imaging with handheld Ultrasound (low-res but live).
I’m going to make a ton of assumptions here about how it’s supposed to work but;
Some phones have the ability to recreate 3d spaces using infrared and a lot of data points. https://www.3dmag.com/3d-wikipedia/phone-3d-scanning-lidar-iphone-3d-apps-guide/
Now assume we have the ability to both transmit and easily detect quantum particles and their attributes.
