The Science of Super Tech
There is no such thing but it sounded better than "The curse of stupid expectations."
When I was young there were lots of jokes, comics and cartoons about a thing called a fluoroscope. To use it, you stood behind a screen and a picture of your insides showed up on the screen. Magic! The way it worked was simple. You were between the screen and an x-ray gun. It turns out, this is wildly unhealthy. X-rays are a form of what we also call radiation. Radiation is bad for you!
When you have a regular x-ray done, there's all kinds of shielding and warnings all over the place and they calculate very carefully exactly how much radiation you can tolerate before being fried to a crisp. They take the shot and then stop. With a fluoroscope, it's a continuous, real time thing.
So when I asked ChatGPT if fluoroscopy was still used, I thought it was lying when it said, "Yes." But the FDA says so too1. It mentions that they use a LOT less radiation now than they used to. Back when the thing was invented, the danger of radiation was not at all understood. Except for the unintentional sacrifices of Marie Curie and many soldiers who sat outside during atomic bomb tests in the 1940s and 50s, we still wouldn't know nearly as much about it. Well, maybe we would. We have the examples of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Chernobyl to give us some subtle hints.
Now we have better ways of peering at our insides. I mean, without actually cutting them open and looking, which is still an option2. We have CT scans (Computer Tomography) that are really just fancy x-rays. And we have MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imagery) for those of us who like enclosed spaces combined with loud noises. What do you mean no one likes that? I thought I was the only one who hated it.
On that subject, I was interested to read a while back that someone invented a portable MRI device. Instead of climbing inside it, you just lay on a table and they pull it over to you. Wearing a strait jacket while it's working, to get the full effect, is optional. Anyway, there's probably some problems of accuracy with the portable one. Either that, or there's so much money in the big, noisy, horrible ones that no one wants to go the smaller, quieter, cheaper route.
When I checked with Google to see if this was the case, the only portable MRIs I found were used only for brain imaging. I was hoping for something more general purpose. What I was actually hoping for was a tricorder. Like the ones on the original Star Trek3. With those things, Dr. McCoy could diagnose ANYTHING. Except some new alien disease that no one had ever encountered before. Those things usually took a few extra minutes. Maybe even two commercial breaks.
A few years ago the X-Prize foundation ran a competition to get someone to make a Star Trek type tricorder. In 2017 they awarded $2.6 million to a team from Final Frontier Medical Devices, which is a subgroup or something of Basil Leaf Technologies. I looked up their website, which has almost no content4. It talks about the device that won the XPrize, called dxter. I thought it was in poor taste naming a medical device for a TV serial killer5 but what do I know? Anyway, I asked Google and Amazon both if I could buy a Dxter but all they wanted to sell me was blu rays and dvds of the show Dexter.
Anyway, as near as I can tell (which isn't saying much) there's no kind of tricorder on the market.
What a let down!
But it gets worse. According to the all-knowing source of knowledge, Wikipedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tricorder is for _consumers_ to "self-diagnose." It's not a tool for doctors like Star Trek told us. A hand held device like a tricorder is in exactly the same class as your smart phone that has apps that claim to be able to check your heart rate and respiration. I have a bed that does that, too. So my bed is a tricorder!
Huh?!?
I'm thinking the marketing dweebs have robbed us of our science fiction toys. But it's not just them. The dream of a working tricorder was never going to be an easy one. There's these little things called the laws of physics to deal with, after all. We already saw that with the fluoroscope. By the way, do you have any idea how many different ways there are to misspell fluoroscope? I really hate that word! But getting back to the subject, in order to get pictures of people's insides without actually cutting them open, you need to input some kind of energy and then interpret the way the flow of the energy is distorted by the tissue and bone and stuff that gets in the way. There are just so many kinds of energy you can use and they all tend to be pretty dangerous if you're not careful how much you use.
Those old TV writers never had to explain how the tricorder thingy worked. If they tried to explain it today they would probably invent some kind of energy or just use the word "quantum" a lot. Maybe you've noticed how that works. In modern "science" fiction writing, quantum can do anything. It's like magic only sciencey!
So maybe, if you use enough machine learning6, you can build something that can sort of measure someone's body temperature, blood pressure and heart rate from a picture. I've seen articles claiming you can also check their blood sugar levels and even diagnose a cold or something. I suspect those are stretching the accuracy of the technology. By which I mean, don't count on it being right. Talk to your doctor. You might not be able to count on them being right either, but they try. And they're easier to sue when they make mistakes.
I think. This is not legal advice! If you need that, talk to a lawyer. Maybe I should start adding those kinds of disclaimers at the bottom of every post I write. Just in case.
Let's see. It's about time for me to wrap it up. We started talking about medical imaging. It's wonderful! There are several fantastic options that help doctors a lot, which is a good thing because we don't have medical tricorders and won't have them anytime soon. Sorry. Sure, there are interesting things going on, like the sugar level checking thing I mentioned. But it's just not the same as pushing a button and getting a complete diagnosis and treatment plan from a single device.
And before you ask, no, we're not any closer phasers, either. As much as I would like to have one, especially when I'm in a hurry and traffic is really heavy, I don't see those happening this century. Sorry. You're just going to deal with traffic, and doctors, the old fashioned way.
Could be worse. Could be raining7.
Here's that prompt: "A humorous scene featuring a Star Trek-style landing party, comprised of diverse futuristic crew members in colorful uniforms, struggling to operate a Tricorder that resembles a Fisher Price toy, oversized and brightly colored with large buttons. Surrounding them are several playful monkeys, some hanging from trees and others on the ground, all appearing to heckle the crew by mimicking their confusion and gestures. The setting is a lush, alien jungle with vibrant plants and unusual flora."
Also unusual: The dall-e- seems to have a problem figuring out which ones are monkeys and which ones are crew, where ot put insignia and what a tail looks like. Not to mention where it goes. This is a fun picture!
But don't try it at home.
The version of Star Trek I know best.
Look for yourself: https://basilleaftech.com/
Machine learning is a kind of artificial intelligence, as long as you don't worry too much about the "intelligence" part.
That’s a movie reference, by the way. If you don’t know which movie, then your education has been terrible and you should fix that immediately!