Whether as a patient or as a practitioner, the technological and experiential changes in the medical field are nothing short of transformational and quite literally life-changing. Our recent partnership with Elekta to help design a next generation cancer killing radiation system and a DNA sequencing instrumentation device got me thinking about these dramatic changes. As we are seeing every day at Arrow Intelligent Systems, these changes bring huge treatment opportunities for patients, innovative tools for medical professionals, and challenges in bringing them to the real world.
New patient opportunities emerge every day. Human gene-based therapies that have been the dream of medical researchers for decades, are now becoming reality. The idea of gene-based therapy is simple and elegant – an engineered virus is used to deliver healthy copies of a gene into patients with defective genes. Along with gene-based therapy, a confluence of innovation breakthroughs – human genome, DNA sequencing and modification, nanotechnology-based disease detection, artificial intelligence-driven symptom diagnosis, electronic medical records and more all point to great promise in curing disease and enhancing human vitality rates across the globe.
Medical technologies are evolving rapidly. It is unsurprising that the internet and digital revolutions portend profound changes in medical instrumentation and the jobs of medical professionals Doctors are using technology in all aspects of their jobs from using IT databases for easily accessing patient health records, to performing precise surgeries using high-tech surgical aids and robots. Arrow recently partnered with IBM, working together using IBM Watson, to bring the power of artificial intelligence-based insights to the medical field. Watson targets cutting edge fields like Genomics, oncology and drug discovery, while also easing the management of patient medical records and administration of social programs like medicare.
In parallel, the chip technology landscape is undergoing a rapid transformation, to create even more dramatic changes in the medical field. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel vie to bring to market ever-more powerful chips that can overcome the computational challenges of big data, machine learning, and blockchains. These computational paradigms, despite having originated in fields like gaming and fintech, are very useful in solving long-standing medical and health related problems.
There are challenges in bringing these technological advancements to patients and medical professionals. The medical field has unique criteria that must be met before devices and technologies can be used in the real world. Patient safety, long term health impacts, patient comfort, privacy, mobility, tamper-proofing, compliance, and stringent regulatory approval criteria, are all factors as designers rush to create the next generation of medical devices. These factors need parallel consideration as technologists bring together a hyperconnected world-of-end devices, communication networks, and cloud-based analytics.
Several customers, with Arrow’s help and expertise, are bringing many medical innovations to market. For these innovations to become a reality, old systems must be replaced with more compute intensive models. Since data volume, variety and velocity create new demands on compute equipment, entire systems from the chip upwards require careful tailoring. Arrow’s experts help companies like Elekta, future-proof their systems and bring about important insights based on data. Simultaneously, we are helping customers innovate while coping with technology availability, and complex adoption of new advances.
Patients and medical professionals alike see and benefit from the dramatic innovations changing the medical field. Many of these innovation efforts target lower cost, greater ease-of-use and precise tailoring of medicines to the patient. Some, like Elekta’s DNA sequencer, usher in new cures to diseases by furthering our understanding of the DNA level root causes; thus rewriting our history well into our future. By partnering with innovative companies, it is both gratifying and inspiring for us to be able to do our little bit to design and define core technology for next generation medical breakthroughs both now and in the future.
