Technology

Acute

How Technology has Changed Healthcare

Many innovative leaps in health technology have been made in the centuries people have been practicing medicine, yet few have had as much widespread influence or impact as digital technology. Dramatic improvements in networking and computers have not only expanded options for medical treatments but have also transformed how clinicians perform their jobs.

as the 1960s (link resides outside ibm.com), computers were initially too expensive and unreliable for medical practices to rely on. As technology improved and costs came down, policies and data standards (link resides outside ibm.com) were created to encourage healthcare organizations to adopt new technology not just for medical equipment, like diagnostic imaging machines, but also for everyday record keeping. Paper medical records were digitized and mostly replaced with electronic health records (EHRs) that help make it easier for health data like test results or diagnoses to be accessed efficiently and securely.

Robotics Surgery

Robotics Surgery

PET CT

PET CT

Cyberknife

Cyberknife

Robotic Surgery

Robotic surgery is an method to perform surgery using small tolls attached to robotic arm During robotic-assisted surgery, surgeon makes several small incisions, then uses a 3DHD camera for a crystal-clear, magnified view of the surgical field. Surgeon sits at a console next to the patient and operates through the incisions using tiny instruments and the camera. Every hand movement of surgeon makes is translated by the da Vinci system in real-time, bending and rotating the instruments so he can comfortably perform the surgery. State-of-the-art operating theaters are equipped with the da vinci ® surgical system. It is the most advance platform for minimally invasive surgery available today.

This for arm robotic system is use in the specialties of Urology, Gynecology, Cardiology, Gastrointestinal surgery, bariatrics and pediatrics surgery.

Robotic surgery offers many benefits to patients as compare to open surgery, including less pain, faster recovery, less blood loss, more safety etc.Our surgical team in the Mahatma Gandhi Hospital well tainted in robotic surgery

PET-CT Positron Emission Tomography & Computerized Tomography

A PET-CT scanner is a large machine with a round, donut-shaped hole in the middle. Multiple rings of detectors inside the machine record the energy emissions from the radiotracer in the body. Combined PET/CT scanners perform almost all PET scans today. These combined scans help pinpoint abnormal metabolic activity and may provide more accurate diagnoses than the two scans performed separately.

MGH

PET/CT

Positron emission tomography (PET) uses small amounts of radioactive materials called radiotracers or radiopharmaceuticals, a special camera and a computer to evaluate organ and tissue functions. By identifying changes at the cellular/molecular level, PET may detect the early onset of disease(cancer) before USG,X-Ray,CT,MRI imaging tests.

It is contraindicated in pregnant or you are breastfeeding women. Nuclear Medicine physician will tell you how to prepare based on the type of your exam. Patients have to discuss any recent illnesses, medical conditions, medications you are taking and allergies – specially to contrast material. Doctor will likely tell you not to eat anything and to drink only water for several hours before your scan. Leave jewelry at home and wear loose, comfortable clothing.

You may wear a gown during the exam. Indication of PET-CT Examination: Various Cancer diagnosis, Staging, Restaging and evaluation of response to therapies. It is also used to detect the myocardial viability (Heart Attack) and Sarcoidosis, Alzheimer’s disease & Epilepsy.

Common uses of the PET-CT procedure

Doctors perform PET and PET/CT scans to

  • Detect cancer and/or make a diagnosis.
  • Determine whether a cancer has spread in the body.
  • Assess the effectiveness of treatment.
  • Determine if a cancer has returned after treatment.
  • Evaluate prognosis.
  • Assess tissue metabolism and viability.
  • Determine the effects of a heart attack myocardial infarction on areas of the heart.
  • Identify areas of the heart muscle that would benefit from angioplasty or coronary artery bypass surgery (in combination with a myocardial perfusion scan).
  • Evaluate brain abnormalities, such as tumors, memory disorders, seizures and other central nervous system disorders.
  • Map normal human brain and heart function.

CyberKnife

The CyberKnife System is Rajasthan's first highly advanced stereotactic radiosurgery system that uses precise, focused radiation beams to target and destroy tumors or abnormal tissue in the body. The Cyberknife Radiosurgery System is used worldwide for the treatment of brain tumors, prostate cancers, and early cancers of the lung, liver, pancreas, and kidney with results comparable to surgery. It is a non-invasive treatment for cancerous and noncancerous tumors and other conditions where radiation therapy is indicated. It treats targets anywhere in the body throughout the CNS. It treats static, moving tumors, and the tumors move with respiration. Unlike traditional surgery, it doesn’t require any incisions, anesthesia, or hospital stays. The sessions are quick, painless, and bloodless and get over in 1–5 days with minimal side effects.

MGH
It delivers high-dose radiation with submillimeter accuracy

It is the only radiation delivery system that features a compact linear accelerator directly mounted on a computer-controlled treatment robot arm. It automatically tracks and corrects tumor motion. With the help of advanced robotics, real-time imaging, and artificial intelligence, the CyberKnife system can track and adjust for any movements in the tumor, ensuring accurate delivery of radiation even in hard-to-reach locations and can even be offered to elderly and medically conditioned patients.

The Cyberknife S7 Treatment Planning System is an easy-to-use and versatile inverse planning platform suitable for stereotactic radiosurgery and radiation therapy.

  • The Cyberknife robot can only travel in a robot workspace around the treatment site, having predefined nodal positions as per the treatment plan of the patient.
  • The radiation dose is delivered using multiple beams oriented at nodal positions around the patients.
  • The Optimized Path Transversal (OPT) offers reduced treatment delivery time, minimized zero MU node positions, and dynamically inserted imaging nodes that maintain an imaging interval close to what was set.
  • The fixed and dynamic safety zones are defined in order to avoid collisions.

The image guidance system provides a stereotactic frame of reference.

It tracks and detects patient and target movement during treatment. It creates 45° image pairs. The CyberKnife System has continual image guidance and correction throughout the entire treatment. The clinical accuracy is within millimeters for all tracking modalities, making the CyberKnife System a beneficial treatment machine.

  • Synchrony Skull Tracking < 0.5 mm error
  • Synchrony Spine Tracking = 0.5 to 0.6 mm
  • Synchrony fiducial tracking in prostate = submillimeter accuracy
  • Synchrony Lung Tracking (phantom) = 0.55 to 0.7 mm
  • Synchrony Model Error = 0.6 mm

The Cyberknife System has shown promising results in treating cancer. Bringing us one step closer to a world without cancer.

Benefits of Technology in Healthcare

  • Improving patient care and experiences

    Using technology to measure and capture data across the whole system of patient care gives health organizations a big-picture view of how they're performing. Technology also helps to automate that measurement so organizations can continuously review their results, spot issues that need to be fixed and uncover ways to enhance care and the patient experience.

  • Real-time information exchange

    From clinicians to patients to payers, many different groups need to be able to access health records for different reasons. Traditionally, organizations have had to maintain different records for each group. But with new technology that makes it easier for digital patient records to be standardized and stored securely, more organizations are integrating their data so that authorized people can access the records they need at the time they need them.

  • Flexibility for patients and clinicians

    Patients are busy and finding time for appointments can be a struggle. Telemedicine technology and patient portals provide more ways for people to communicate with health professionals. Wearable technology, like heart monitors, also gives clinicians more ways to evaluate the well-being of their patients and provides them with more options to record and evaluate symptoms as patients go about their lives.

Next-Generation sequencing (NGS)

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is a massively parallel sequencing technology that offers ultra-high throughput, scalability, and speed. The technology is used to determine the order of nucleotides in entire genomes or targeted regions of DNA or RNA. NGS has revolutionized the biological sciences, allowing labs to perform a wide variety of applications and study biological systems at a level never before possible.

Today's complex genomics questions demand a depth of information beyond the capacity of traditional DNA sequencing technologies. NGS has filled that gap and become an everyday tool to address these questions.

Applications of NGS Next-generation sequencing technology has fundamentally changed the kinds of questions scientists can ask and answer. Innovative sample preparation and data analysis options enable a broad range of applications. For example, NGS allows labs to:

Next-generation-sequencing
  • Rapidly sequence whole genomes
  • Deeply sequence target regions
  • Utilize RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) to discover novel RNA variants and splice sites, or quantify mRNAs for gene expression analysis
  • Analyze epigenetic factors such as genome-wide DNA methylation and DNA-protein interactions
  • Sequence cancer samples to study rare somatic variants, tumor subclones, and more
  • Study the human microbiome
  • Identify novel pathogens

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