Medical Center Implements New Technology

Vanderbilt University’s Medical Center’s Center for Experiential Learning and Assessment is implementing some exciting new technology which promises to be groundbreaking for medical students and physiologists. A new, twelve thousand square foot lab has just been constructed – at the cost of five and a half million dollars.

The new lab contains two programs: the Program in Human Simulation and the Simulation Technologies Program. The former will allow students to go through clinical practices, which will lead to improvements in their interpersonal skills.

Mannequins will be used to simulate human patients. They are computer based and, as such, are physiologically similar to humans. The individual mannequins will be used to portray individual patients, not to mention family members, doctors, nurses, and any other people students will be in contact with during real time and real life situations.

Cisco Unveils New SAN Technology

My precious computer geek, l33t brethren, rejoice – Cisco is unveiling some new technology. Specifically, they’ve developed a new Storage Area Network, or SAN, which they promise will improve the performance and scalability of SAN systems. As well, the management of the systems will be much simpler, the date will be safer, and the SAD services on virtual machines will be better. The premise behind this new technology is to help users create, from design to construction, the next generation of data centers.

The new SAN is part of an expansion of the Data Center 3.0 series of Cisco’s products. They expect it will make data centers respond better, in addition to making them more resilient and efficient. The SAN technologies include three new modules from the MDS 9000 line as well as new features found in their SAN OS. Its new name is the NX-OS. The new switch modules has eight gigabits. You can use them in any combination, and they will increase both port density and performance, by into a preexisting Cisco chassis. The bonus is that this will not require any major upgrades.

MBI Breast Cancer Technology

There’s some brand new technology out, beneficial to women. It’s a new screening tool, designed to detect breast cancer. The clincher is that it can work three times better than the typical mammogram, thereby finding tumors faster and earlier. Furthermore, it can find tumors in women who have very dense breast tissue, which mammography has had problems with for years.

A mammogram is essentially an X-ray of a woman’s breasts. In comparison with the new technology, the old standard was found to find less than one third of the tumors discovered by the new technique.

The technique is called molecular breast imaging – MBI for short. It promises to make the process of finding breast cancer tumors faster, easier, and less invasive. For instance, patience will no longer need to be injected with the radioactive agents, which are absorbed by the tissue and used to make the tumors themselves show up in the X-ray. Instead, MBI uses cameras. It has a very low risk of radiation, but the makers are working to make even that small risk a non issue.