July 19, 2008 - An article on www.techradar.com outlines the premise behind Intel's 'wonder chip' for medical diagnostics. The introduction and link to the full article are below:
"Medical diagnostics is a pretty time consuming and expensive endeavour. Testing bodily fluids for various markers of ailments and disease, spooling up those high tech scanners... it all adds to the cost of health care. It's a cost that is becoming increasingly crippling in developed nations.
But what if there was a technology that was not only massively cheaper, but also much faster, as well as more sensitive and more capable? Well, there is.
At least that's what Ilan Levy, one of Intel's big brains at its research centre in Israel (yup, that'll be the same Israeli outfit that saved Intel's bacon with first, the Pentium M, and then, Core 2 CPU architectures).
The basic idea is simple enough to grasp. To use Intel's peerless silicon chip expertise to mass produce a computer chip festooned with diagnostic sensors. "We have developed a single-die chip with 148 different sensors capable of multiple levels of analysis," Levy explains.
Thanks to the use of cutting-edge silicon technology, the final production chip is likely to be very small, and hence extremely cheap. That in turn should allow it to be integrated into a low cost, disposable, single-use cartridge that plugs into a larger reusable device.
For this usage model, bodily fluids are passed over the chip and the resulting signal or data is wirelessly sent to a control system. Simply replace the cartridge and repeat for each test subject."
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