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.
The thing is most of the medical scans can’t be miniaturized like that. There are hard physical limitations on what say, magnetic resonance can do and from how far away. And then you’re trying to put all different types of tech into a single super small box. They do radical different stuff that requires completely separate hardware.
IMO, it’s not physically possible to miniaturise single high resolution scanner let alone bunch of them in a single package
Am actual doctor. I think we’re both closer to and further away from a Tricorder than you think.
Point of care ultrasound has been booming for the last 1-2 decades. There are now cell-phone sized wireless probes you can easily put in your pocket and do multiple diagnostic scans on the heart, lung, belly, etc with the caveat that you have to be adept at both obtaining and interpreting ultrasound images which certainly takes a lot of process.
There are devices about as big as 2-3 cell phones (think label maker or portable speaker sized) which can reliably run a whole panel of common blood tests including electrolytes, a blood gas, and hemoglobin on a 1-2mL blood sample in <5min. We also have dedicated point of care A1C devices, PT/INR devices, and probably some more I don’t know about.
I don’t think we’ll ever have handheld xray/CT solely due to the significant radiation risk the operator would experience, even if the technology could be miniaturized.
I don’t think handheld MRI will ever happen either. The power requirement alone for the magnet strength needed is immense, not to mention the dangers of the magnetic field in some random unsecured area and the length of normal scans makes a handheld device impractical.
I don’t think we’ll ever have “bloodless” comprehensive blood testing. There’s only so much you can do with spectroscopy, and some things like electrolytes are in dramatically different concentrations between the cells and the blood so scanning through skin would likely dramatically alter readings.
TLDR we are actively miniaturizing some medical technologies. There are physics limitations in "handheld-izing " most non-ultrasound diagnostic imaging, and while we’ve certainly made great progress in point of care labs, I don’t think we’re going to get a device that can measure those things without a blood sample.
Honestly the way they used it, I always thought the tricorder was just the reading part of other diagnostic implements. Kind of an all in one CGM, implanted pacemaker, etc.
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
Burn the heretic!! 😡
No you’re not! :D
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Disgusting 🤮
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.
Yeah, you probably could produce a medical tricorder right now which could detect if someone is dead.
Will smaller medical diagnostics be developed? Yes.
Will we see a fully realized tricorder in our lifetime? Probably not.
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.
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!
The concept of the hypospray was developed when producers of the original Star Trek series discovered that NBC’s broadcast standards and practices prohibited the use of hypodermic syringes to inject medications; the needleless hypospray sidestepped this issue.
OK I never saw it that way, I always assumed it works like an Epipen, which is not needleless. But in TV I guess it’s about not seeing the needle.
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.
Dunno if youve heard of it, but a number of years ago, there was a company called Theranos, a scam that claimed they could test for all manner of diseases in a short time with just a drop of your blood.
Note that i said “scam” because its obviously BS. Im not familiar with the exact medical capabilities of the tricorder (only ever watched a handful of episodes) but i feel like real next-level medical analysis would come via nano-robots in the bloodstream, not some external device. Then again, its been a couple of years since i heard of advancements in the nano-robot category too.
Oh yeah I saw the whole Theranos thing. I know a lot of this stuff isn’t possible for now at least. I was just curious if in principle there are physical things stopping this from ever being reality or not. I remember part of the thing with Theranos was something about the machines not even being big enough for the size of the things they were looking at or something like that.
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.
