• Question: Computer science already heals some medical scenarios, is it likely that in is it going to be used more in the future and why?

    Asked by theojoseph2 to Ed, Hayley, Jason, Nathan, Sophie on 11 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Jason King

      Jason King answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Computers are becoming more and more useful to medicine. They are really powerful because the help us to make sense of the enormous amount of information that we can now get. One of the most important advances in the past few years is the ability to do things like sequence entire genomes really fast. This gives us huge amounts of data, that a human cannot hope to cope with. We can use this to do things like compare lots of different tumours to try and work out the common mutations that may cause them and then work out a better treatment.

      Computers also help us to put together loads of patient data, like how people respond to different therapies, to identify patterns and improve treatment. These days we really need computer people to cope with all the information out there!

    • Photo: Edward Bovill

      Edward Bovill answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Computers and medical physics are really important even in today’s medicine.
      Amazing machines like MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanners, by using computers and very clever physics, allow us to look inside people to see problems that they are having inside joints or other parts of their body they are having problems with.
      Computers are also being used in some cases to help surgeons perform surgery on patients. Some keyhole surgery is now carried out by computer driven arms that the surgeon controls using a couple of fancy joysticks. This apparently allows them to make more accurate movements.
      By sequencing the genetic code of individual people, medicine can be made that is specifically for them. Genetic sequencing could also allow doctors to see whether individual patients are likely to develop nasty diseases such as cancer and alzheimer’s and treat or prepare them in advance.

    • Photo: Nathan Green

      Nathan Green answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Computers are the opposite of me: they like to doing repetitive tasks, they are hardworking and they have a great memory! Things that could take you or I ages to do can now be done in a blink of an eye by a computer and information about all sorts of things can be stored and used when before we just didnt have the room. Doctors could collect really detailed information about people to come up with really accurate guesses about who’ll get ill, when, and how to treat them. They could use the information recorded by your iPhone to see if youre doing enough exercise even. We could mash together information from all kinds of random and different place using computers to give us a kind of superinformation which is even better than before. Like when the Transformers all link together with cars for arms and vans for legs!

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