Another Look At The Future Of Medical Processing

Five years ago, the authors of this paper published their view of future trends in medical imaging in a paper titled, “The future of medical imaging.”1 Now, this paper will revisit those visions to reflect upon changes that have taken place and take another look forward at medical imaging.

One main driver for the future of medical care remains the same as it was five years ago: making healthcare personal. As expected, there has been progress, but improvements are moving faster than anticipated due to rapidly advancing technology in everything from smart phones and applications to the cloud, all playing a key role in the development of personal medicine.

Another trend that continues is the movement of healthcare from diagnostic- and treatment-oriented to preventive, while continuously improving on all three. This effort is aided by the enormous amount of medical data that can be available in the cloud but hindered by the legalities and processes around sharing medical information and the ability to make sense from such massive data sets. As usual, technology will pave the path with workload-optimized servers running advanced analytics to analyze the data and send useful information to personal clouds, allowing healthcare to move in the direction of preventive (or “predictive”) medicine.