My idea for a medical scanner!

[Meredith]

I have a keychain red LED light that is really powerful, it is so powerful that in fact it can shine right through my fingers and I can see my veins inside of my finger.

So I was thinking, what would happen if you could take several dozen of these things and tie them together to make a really bright red light. Would it be enough to see the bones int he hand and would a certain frequency of visible light be able to shine through the skin and soft tissue but be blocked by bones.

Now you have to do this in a darkened room, but could a medical device be used for setting broken bones, checking for tumors in the extremities etc....

It could save money as LEDs are simple and could be a cheap easy to use medical device for 3rd world countries..... And a lot safer and cheaper to operate than X-ray machines....

 

[Gepard]

They already do that with those little oxygen sensors that go on your finger in the hospital.

I think that's pretty much the limit of the technology, though.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

Pulse-Ox sensors use infrared, but yeah.

Internal organs, bones and muscle are more dense and more opaque so light would have a rough time getting through.

Try ultrasonic sound? ;-)

 

[Crazy Eddie]

A friend of mine from Penn Med developed a prototype for an electronic nose. I'm about 100% sure that that's how medical tricorders work.

 

[Meredith]

A friend of mine from Penn Med developed a prototype for an electronic nose. I'm about 100% sure that that's how medical tricorders work.

"Tricorder"

...

"Medical Tricorder!"

My Favorite scene in Caretaker!!!

So the cylinder thingie is a electronic nose?

 

[Peter the Younger]

A friend of mine from Penn Med developed a prototype for an electronic nose. I'm about 100% sure that that's how medical tricorders work.

Yeah, i always figured it was olfactory analysis combined with some sort of terahertz band imaging.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

A friend of mine from Penn Med developed a prototype for an electronic nose. I'm about 100% sure that that's how medical tricorders work.

"Tricorder"

...

"Medical Tricorder!"

My Favorite scene in Caretaker!!!

So the cylinder thingie is a electronic nose?

Pretty much. Some kind of sensor that sucks air in through one end and then analyzes every single chemical trace that passes through it. Something similar to your natural olfactory sensors, but hundreds of times more sensitive. That would be a logical use of technology; after all, WE currently use trained dogs to do the job of tricorders in the search for drugs, bombs, fugitives, missing persons, etc, and the whole point behind the electronic nose was that some animals can be trained to detect the trace markers for specific types of cancer cells just by smelling a patient. An electronic device that can give you a detailed readout of what it "smells" would be the ultimate perfection of that concept:

Kirk: "That smell... sickly sweet..."
Spock, looking at tricorder: "That would be gaseous dichironium."

A friend of mine from Penn Med developed a prototype for an electronic nose. I'm about 100% sure that that's how medical tricorders work.

Yeah, i always figured it was olfactory analysis combined with some sort of terahertz band imaging.

Actually, I think the "tri" stand for three different sense modes: EM (every spectrum from radio waves through x-rays), olfatory, and sonic. A medical tricorder could conduct a full physical of a person by literally taking X-rays of his bones, analyzing chemical traces from his blood and tissues and conducting ultrasound imaging of his internal organs and soft tissues all at the same time. Add to that some expert software that can analyze all the data and identify possible problems, and you've just crammed ten million dollars worth of examination equipment into a device the size of an iPod.

I think this also gives you the distinction between regular and medical tricorders. Both have the detachable scanner head/saltshaker thing, but the medical scanner can do all three scan modes at once while the standard tricorder only has the "smell" sensor in the probe (where the other two sensors are built into the tricorder itself).

 

[Alpha_Geek]

They tried something like this artificial nose technology during the Viet Nam war era to try and detect enemy combatants in the brush. IIRC, they were looking for small traces of ammonia and other byproducts of primate or mamallian biology.

They ran into problems such as wind, false positives from nonhuman targets, false positives from the operator, etc, etc.

In a Trek universe, beaming small samples into a sensing chamber would help eliminate some of these errors.

In our reality, I guess we're stuck with other technology for any hope of accurate remote sensing.

 

[Kaziarl]

I think this also gives you the distinction between regular and medical tricorders. Both have the detachable scanner head/saltshaker thing, but the medical scanner can do all three scan modes at once while the standard tricorder only has the "smell" sensor in the probe (where the other two sensors are built into the tricorder itself).

I don't remember the detachable salt shaker for the ragular tricorders. Can you give an example?

Anyway, as stated it would make sense that tricorder scans those three... whats a good word... aspect of the world around them? I guess I always just assumed thats what it did without thinking about it. To tired to add more, will try later. Was mainly curious about the salt shaker. Or do the regular ones have pepper shakers?

 

[Alpha_Geek]

If I'm derailing the topic here, someone slap me...

It's also possible that the "tri" in "trcorder" refers to types of scanning technology used rather than the actual properties being scanned for.

It could mean:
1. Passive- sensing the eminations from the scanned object

2. Active- sending forth energy of some type (sound, RF, EMF, etc) and interpreting the reflected signal

3. Some heretofore unknown method (Quantum? Ask Shrodingers Cat?), but hey... Trek is The Future!

 

[Verteron]

It's also possible that the "tri" in "trcorder" refers to types of scanning technology used rather than the actual properties being scanned for.

Your theory is interesting, but keep in mind that by the 24thC the 'tri' might not stand for anything anymore. The first handheld scanners of this sort invented, let's say, in the mid-21st century might've been 'tricorders' and recorded three specific types of inputs.

Later models may have added more and more (the TNG model may scan hundreds of different types of input), but since the term 'tricorder' had already been coined, it stayed in the vernacular and the word took on new meaning.

There are plenty of examples of this happening in English over the last few centuries, word stems changing so that the original Greek or Roman is meaningless.

A good example would be the word artificial, which has the stem art, and 400 years ago meant "full of artistic skill". The modern definition has very little to do with art!

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I think this also gives you the distinction between regular and medical tricorders. Both have the detachable scanner head/saltshaker thing, but the medical scanner can do all three scan modes at once while the standard tricorder only has the "smell" sensor in the probe (where the other two sensors are built into the tricorder itself).

I don't remember the detachable salt shaker for the ragular tricorders. Can you give an example?

It wasn't used as often as it should have been. Tasha used one to scan their room in "Angel One" and I believe Doctor Selar used one in "Schitzoid Man" unless I'm remembering wrong and that was a medical tricorder. There are other instances too, but they don't come to mind.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

All I remember in Schitzoid Man was Number 6 using the watch off his doppleganger to contol Rover when he was trying to get to the helicopt... Ooops... right episode name, wrong TV show.

As you were!