Early detection of Cancer it can literally save lives. In addition to screening programs, medical imaging has had a great impact on public health. We know that the healthcare sector has faced multiple challenges related to this disease. Firstly, because there are more and more types of tumors and secondly, because more and more people suffer from it every day. This is due not only to hereditary conditions but also to people’s lifestyle, diet, use of drugs, geographical influences and consumption habits, to name just a few.
For a cancer to be considered common, the estimated number of new cases for 2020 had to be 40,000 or more. In the case of America, the most numerous is breast cancer because only Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and the United States have an incidence of more than 11 percent of the population, with a mortality rate of more than 6 percent. The foregoing has revealed a worrying reality for public health and hospitals, and this global problem has led companies to seek a technological proposal that helps specialists to detect this disease in a timely manner. This is where the importance of display technologies begins to be appreciated.
Advancement in technology
In the early 2000s, medical imaging began to move from analog to digital. Replacing film images with digital images eliminates the time required for processing. As a result, they become immediately accessible from anywhere. This translates into faster examinations and diagnoses for patients, while giving healthcare professionals a more efficient way of working.
In most countries radiologists no longer watch movies in a light box. Instead, they read digital images on a special medical screen. This has led to faster examinations and diagnoses for patients and instigated the rise of telemedicine and imaging throughout the hospital, explained Francisco Fandiño, Latin America Sales Director at Boat.
Today, the digitization of healthcare has resulted in hospital-wide images, also known as business images. Since clinical images can be captured using a large number of devices and in a wide variety of locations, there is a pressing need for consolidation. Often times, the availability of information on care is limited by technical issues, resulting in fragmented information for healthcare professionals.
These images are a way of integrating all patient information and optimizing how it can be managed, viewed and shared throughout the hospital. In addition to diagnostic images, it includes procedure images and test images, as well as reports.
According to Barco’s medical imaging technology specialist, “There are specially developed visualization solutions to streamline the oncology workflow in multidisciplinary meetings, helping clinicians discuss many highly complex patient cases faster and more efficiently. . It means that health technology is used to provide specialists with a more holistic view of patient data, for more accurate decision making ”.
Current alternatives
New techniques in medical imaging have the potential to change the face of healthcare forever. For example, digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) is one of the newest innovations in breast cancer detection, which takes multiple images or slices of the breast and then reconstructs a 3D image. The benefits of tomosynthesis are that it reduces patient recovery rates and increases cancer detection.
On the other hand, the smartest form of medical technology is image analysis based on deep learning and artificial intelligence. Google announced the results of its latest health care artificial intelligence (LYNA) project, which has been shown to detect cancer cells in pathology slides with 99 percent accuracy.
Latin America faces a health crisis caused by cancer, so it is important to take into account the technological aspects that help specialists to carry out their work more efficiently, in such a way as to reduce mortality rates. Therefore, it is important to highlight the importance of making this condition visible as a public health problem, so that patients have access to a timely diagnosis and care in all public health instances.