Xbox 360's save lives

ChewyWaffles

Saw this a few minutes ago and thought it seemed relevant to the interests of this forum:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1925332,00.html

The system, detailed in a study in the August edition of the Journal of Computational Biology and Chemistry, is based on a video-game demo created by Simon Scarle two years ago when he was a software engineer at Microsoft's Rare studio, the division of the U.S.-based company that designs games for the Xbox 360. Scarle modified a chip in the console so that instead of producing graphics for the game, it now delivers data tracking how electrical signals in the heart move around damaged cardiac cells. This creates a model of the heart that allows doctors to identify heart defects or conditions such as arrhythmia, a disturbance in the normal rhythm of the heart that causes it to pump less effectively. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)

"This is a clever use of a processing chip ... to speed up calculations of heart rhythm. What used to take hours can be calculated in seconds, without having to employ an extremely expensive, high-performance computer," Denis Noble, director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University, tells TIME.

To create a heart model now, researchers must use supercomputers or a network of PCs to crunch millions of mathematical equations relating to the proteins, cells and tissues of the heart, a time-consuming and costly process. Scarle's Xbox system can deliver the same results at a rate five times faster and 10 times more cheap, according to the study.

Lunker

The Red Ring of Life.

Zxerol

GPGPU isn't exactly a new thing (see Folding@home accelerated for ATI/Nvidia cards for a home example), and the only novel thing here is that 360s are being used. Even though you can purchase GPUs that are computationally superior to the 360's GPU for cheaper.

ZackSchilling

Stories like this are all too common at the intersections of impossibly complex disciplines. There are thousands of problems that are considered intractable because interdisciplinary communication is so difficult.

Doctors don't know enough about computers to ask for exactly what they need out of a heart monitoring system or even what's computationally possible. Computer guys don't know enough about hearts, the data that can be captured from them, or what's possible using that data to build something to make it all possible.

But occasionally someone comes along who uniquely straddles two worlds, sometimes it's a small team of people, and they do things like this. Things we've needed desperately, have had the technology to do for years, but could not put together due to communication issues.

B:L

Lunker wrote: »

The Red Ring of Life.

It's cool that the systems are being used like this. Remember originally how the PS3 could be modified into a missile control system?