Technology Guru

Cancer is a complex and uncontrollable beast that mutates and changes the goalposts before you get into the politics and economics surrounding the issue. There isn’t just one cancer either – the homogenous term is misleading into thinking the problem is even solvable. Scientists and technologists alike are seeing hope though - not through increased funding but technological advancement in the form of Artificial Intelligence. Recently attending CogX  - one of the more robust and significant AI conferences in the UK - healthcare was very much on the menu. Medicine is already benefitting greatly from machine learning (a subset of AI) in areas from diagnosis to treatment, and we've barely scratched the surface. As more and more data becomes available – along with better computers and science – we start to see a shift happening. “Guilty Doctors” according to Professor Joanna Holbrook, Director Translational Biology, benevolent AI, are now up against a “humanly impossible amount ...

A novel iPhone-based portable ultrasound machine that can help detect cancer easily at home has been developed by US researchers. The device called Butterfly IQ is a scanner of the size of an electric razor that can display black-and-white imagery of the body, when paired with an iPhone. Developed by Connecticut-based start-up Butterfly Network, the pocket sized device works by shooting sound into the body and capturing the echoes. Usually, the sound waves are generated by a vibrating crystal. But Butterfly's machine instead uses 9,000 tiny drums etched onto a semiconductor chip, reported the MIT Technology Review on Friday. Earlier this year, John Martin, a US-based vascular surgeon and chief medical officer at Butterfly Network, discovered a cancerous mass in his own throat while testing the device. Martin felt an uncomfortable feeling of thickness on his throat, thus he oozed out some gel and ran the probe along with his neck. On his smartphone, to which the device is conn...